“The visitors say ’tis fair, but I’ve seen it arl me life,” replied the proprietor, with a quaint smile. And then to me—“but sure the Reeks are illigant in winter wi’ the darlin’ snaws upon them.”
But that was later. That day we were silent with contented fatigue till the muffled boom of the great Atlantic breakers began to fall as distant thunder on our ears: then suddenly Ballinskelligs’ Bay lay before us with the massive headlands of Bolus and Hog’s Head guarding it from the Ocean.
The shore is wild and desolate with the sense of the vast Atlantic ever present; but soon we turned inland again towards the mountains of the “deep Glenmore,” and there, under the purple shadow of Mount Knockaline, lay a long, grave Lough with a tiny deserted islet in its midst upon which one of the ancient beehive cells stands under the eaves of a ruined church. It is Lough Currane, and we drove under overhanging fuchsias, to the Great Southern Hotel on its shore.
We had two more beautiful drives while we were in the Kingdom of Kerry: one along the perilous Irish Cornice, known as the Coomakista Pass, where one prayed one might not meet the coach, to Park-na-Silla; the other from Kenmare over a rocky road to Glengariff.
The Cornice drive beggars description, and I never knew Joe to be so enthusiastic over a view. Shallow little coves fringed with brilliant golden seaweed—upon which herons stand feeding at times—indent the shore itself; but the Sound is studded with numberless islets—some clad with heather, others with semi-tropical shrubs, and faintly ringed with the silver foam of a streaked and gentle sea. In an opal haze beyond them, the opposite shore of County Cork lies as a dream; but the two great guardian cliffs of Ballinskelligs’ Bay with their outriders—the Bull and Cow Rocks—stand in firm and grand outline away whence we came where the Sound joins the Ocean.
The coach driver draws up when he reaches the best point, and tells us all about it, and points out the Great Skellig Rock—twelve miles out to sea, and close at hand the bridle path by which O’Connell rode over the mountains to his home at Darrynane. As we near that Bay and its multitude of tiny islets, upon one of which stands the ruined Monastery of St. Finnan, he shews us the “Liberator’s” very house and then we turn inland again among undulating moors—our road fenced with the fuchsia and every variety of fern, till of a sudden the beautiful bridge and square church tower of Sneem village seem to beckon us into the very heart of a fiery sunset.
Our second drive from Kenmare was again quite different and not without incident. In the first place Irish unpunctuality caused us to start two hours late, and in the second, when the carriage arrived at last, the harness had to be tied up with cord before we could proceed, a beginning which filled me with alarm though it reminded me of youthful days in Italy: but to Joe it only afforded opportunity for pleasant raillery with his compatriot, and I only wish I could remember all the bon-mots with which they capped one another.
The last part of the ascent was very wild, but when we emerged from the tunnel that pierces the topmost granite cliff, the view that burst upon us—though wild still in its freedom from the intrusion of human interest, was soft and tender with all the glamour of the South. Range upon range of finely-chiselled hills stood crossing and re-crossing one another with gentle valleys between, and the glint of water here and there made visible by the golden splash of sunset; and presently the hills—so soft and so solemn upon the mellow evening sky—were cleft to their base, and Bantry Bay lay spread in the distance beneath us.
The road went down in sharp turns and, the driver cheerfully remarking that we should have to pass a motor-roller on the way, my heart jumped into my mouth. But Joe administered a little salutary chaff together with a cup of tea at the wayside inn, where we changed drivers, and a pretty girl assured me that “Faith,” I had “no need to fear, for the lad was the coolest whip on arl the mountain-side.”