Behind them, of course, the Committee of the Dail on the Condition of the Planet Eire explored McGillicuddy Island. They saw the big dinies—sixty-footers and fifty-footers and lesser ones. The dinies ambled aimlessly about the island. Now and again they reached up on elongated, tapering necks with incongruously small heads on them, to snap off foliage that looked a great deal like palm leaves. Now and again, without enthusiasm, one of them stirred the contents of various green-scummed pools and apparently extracted some sort of nourishment from it. They seemed to have no intellectual diversions. They were not interested in the visitors, but one of the committee members—not Moira's grandfather—shivered a little.
"I've dreamed about them," he said plaintively, "but even when I was dreamin' I didn't believe it!"
Two youthful dinies—they would weigh no more than a couple of tons apiece—engaged in languid conflict. They whacked each other with blows which would have destroyed elephants. But they weren't really interested. One of them sat down and looked bored. The other sat down. Presently, reflectively, he gnawed at a piece of whitish rock. The gnawing made an excruciating sound. It made one's flesh crawl. The diny dozed off. His teeth had cut distinct, curved grooves in the stone. The manufacturer of precision machinery—back on Earth—turned pale.
"L-let's get out of here!"
The committee and the two members of the cabinet returned to the shore. There was no boat. It was far away, headed for the mainland.
"Shenanigans!" said Sean O'Donohue in a voice that would have curdled sulphuric acid. "I warned him no shenanigans! The dirty young bog-trotter's left us here to be eaten up by the beasts!"
The solicitor general said hastily: "Divvil a bit of it, sir. We're his friends and he left us in the same boat—no, he left us out of the same boat. It must've been that something important occurred to him——"
But it was not convincing. It seemed highly unconvincing, later, because some long-delayed perception produced a reaction in the dinies' minuscule brains. They became aware of their visitors. They appeared, in a slow-motion fashion, to become interested in them. Slowly, heavily, numbly, they congregated about them—the equivalent of a herd of several hundred elephants of all the colors of the rainbow, with small heads wearing plaintive but persistent expressions. Long necks reached out hopefully.
"The devil!" said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, fretfully. "I'm just thinkin'. You've iron in your shoes and mainsprings in your watches and maybe pocket knives in your pockets. The dinies have a longin' for iron, and they go after it. They'll eat anything in the world that's got the barest bit of a taste of iron in it! Oh, it's perfectly all right, of course, but ye'll have to throw stones at them till the boat comes back. Better, find a good stout stick to whack them with. Only don't let 'em get behind ye!"
"Ye will?" roared the solicitor general, vengefully. "Take that!" Whack! "Tryin' to take somethin' out of the gentleman's hip pocket an' aimin' to grab the rump beyond it just to make sure!"