No one who was present on his return placed the smallest amount of credence in his story. What many of them did believe was of no consequence.
CHAPTER XXIII.—ON THE ATLANTIC.
THE boats were scattered like milestones—as was stated by Brian—through the sinuous length of Lough Suangorm. The cutter yacht Acushla was leading the fleet out to the Atlantic, with two reefs in her mainsail, and although she towed a large punt, and was by no means a fast boat, she had no difficulty in maintaining her place, the fact being that the half-dozen boats that lumbered after her were mainly fishing craft hailing from the village of Cairndhu, and, as all the world knows, these are not built for speed but endurance. They are half-decked and each carries a lug sail. One of the legends of the coast is that when a lug sail is new its colour is brown, and as a new sail is never seen at Cairndhu there are no means of finding out if the story is true or false. The sails, as they exist, are kaleidoscopic in their patchwork. It is understood that anything will serve as a patch for a lug sail. Sometimes the centre-piece of an old coat has been used for this purpose; but if so, it is only fair to state that it is on record that the centre-piece of an old sail has been shaped into a jacket for the ordinary wearing of a lad.
The lug sail may yet find its way into a drawing room in Belgravia and repose side by side with the workhouse sheeting which occupies an honoured place in that apartment.
On through the even waves that roll from between the headlands at the entrance, to the little strand of pebbles at the end of the lough, the boats lumbered. The sea and sky were equally gray, but now and again a sudden gleam of sunshine would come from some unsuspected rift in the motionless clouds, and fly along the crests of the waves, revealing a green transparency for an instant, and then, flashing upon the sails, make apparent every patch in their expanse, just as a flash of lightning on a dark night reveals for a second every feature of a broad landscape.
As the first vessel of the little fleet, pursuing an almost direct course in spite of the curving of the shores of the Irish fjord, approached one coast and then the other, the great rocks that appeared snow-white, with only a dab of black here and there, became suddenly all dark, and the air was filled with what seemed like snow flakes. The cries of the innumerable sea birds, that whirled about the disturbing boat before they settled and the rocks became gradually white once more, had a remarkable effect when heard against that monotonous background, so to speak, of rolling waves.
The narrow lough was a gigantic organ pipe through which the mighty bass of the Atlantic roared everlastingly.
But when the headlands at the entrance were reached, the company who sat on the weather side of the cutter Acushla became aware of a commingling of sounds. The organ voice of the lough only filled up the intervals between the tremendous roar of the lion-throated waves that sprang with an appalling force half way up the black faces of the sheer cliffs, and broke in mid-air. All day long and all night long those inexhaustible billows come rushing upon that coast; and watching them and listening to them one feels how mean are contemporary politics as well as other things.