"A shiolaigh charthannaigh," she said, "O kindly kinsman, na caithtear thusa ins na nealtaibh broin, let you not be thrown under the clouds of sorrow! Acht eirigh in do sheasamh, but rise in your standing, agas gluais liomsa siar' sa' rod, and travel with me westward in the road. Go Tir Dheas na Meala, to the shimmering land of honey where the foreigner has not the sway. And you will find pleasantry in white halls persuading me to the strains of music."
Surely his father, too, had seen Dancing Town!
And it was an old story that Oisin had found it, when he rode with the princess over the waves on a white horse whose hoofs never touched water, and he abode with her in Tir nan Og, in the Land of Them Who are Young, for a thousand years or more, until the great homesickness for Ireland took him, that takes the strongest, and he came for a visit on the white horse; but the girths of the saddle broke, and he fell to the ground, and the horse flew away. And he who had been strong and young and beautiful became old and bald and blind, and Patrick of the Bells and Crosses took him, and put him with the groaning penitents, who beat their breasts under the fear of hell. And he, who had known Tir nan Og and the Silver Woman, was a drooling ancient with a wee lad to lead him.... But that was just a winter's tale with no sense to it.
But there were other things in books that had the ring of truth to them. There was the voyage of Maeldun, who had set out in his coracle, and visited strange islands. The Island of Huge Ants was one, and wee Shane had seen in his geography book pictures of armadillos, and he shrewdly surmised that Maeldun had been to South America. And there was the Island of Red-Hot Animals, but that was a poser. Still and all, the rhinoceros had armor like an old knight's, and that would surely get red-hot under the suns of the equator. It would explain, too, why the rhinoceros favored the water, like a cow in July.... Sure that was it: Maeldun had been to Africa. And Maeldun, too, had found the Fortunate Isle. Brendan, too, had known it. Wasn't it in old charts—St. Brendan's Isle? He said he found it, and surely a saint of God wouldn't lie....
Och, it was there somewhere, but people were different from what they were in the ancient days. They didn't bother. If they had told his father about it, sure all Colquitto would have done was to call for pen and paper.
"Mo bhron air an fhairrge," he would have written: "My grief on the sea—how it comes between me and the land where my mind might be easy—" And then he'd have lain back and chanted it. "'Avourneen, did you ever in all your life hear a poem as good as my poem? Sure old Homer's jealous in the black clouds. Was there ever a Greek poet the equal of a Gaelic one? Anois, teacht an Earraigh—now the moment spring comes in, 't is I will hoist sail, inneosad mo sheol...."
And Alan Donn might have started to find it, but at the first golf links he'd stop, "to take the conceit out of the local people, and to give them something to talk of, and they old men," or to match his coursing greyhound against any dog in the world for a ten-pound note, or to deluther some red-cheeked likely woman....
And Uncle Robin might hear of it, and he'd sit down and write a book, saying where it probably was, and how you might get there, and what the people were like, and whom they were probably descended from.... And the book would be in all the libraries of the world, and people would be writing him telling him what a great head was on him, and he'd mutter: "Nonsense! Nonsense! All nonsense!" and stroke his great red beard....
But wouldn't it be the funny thing, the queer and funny thing, if he himself, wee Shane Campbell, were to go out and discover that island, and to own it, and to have it marked in the maps and charts, "Wee Shane Campbell's Island," for all to read and see?...
"Decent wee fellow, is it about here somewhere the house of the McFees?"