On reaching the strand she went down on her knees and raised her eyes to heaven, looking up through the snowy flakes that were now falling out of the darkness. Then she spoke, and her voice, rising shrill and terrible, carried far across the dhan:
“May seven curses from the lips of Jesus Christ fall seven times seven on the head of Farley McKeown!”
The waves rolled up to her feet, stretching out like black, sinuous snakes; a long, wailing wind, that put droumy thoughts into the hearts of those who listened to it, swept in from the sea. Behind on the shore, large rocks, frightful and shapeless, stood out amidst stunted bushes that sobbed in dismal unison. The women went back to the rocks, passing through bent-grass that shook in the breeze like eels. All around the brambles writhed like long arms clutching at their prey with horrible claws. A tuft of withered fern flew by in the air as if escaping from something which followed it, and again the cry of the solitary sea-bird pierced the darkness.
Between the clefts of a large rock, which in some past age had been split by lightning, the women, worn out with their day’s journey, sat down in a circle, their shawls drawn over their heads and their feet tucked well up under their petticoats. The darkness almost overpowered Norah Ryan; she shuddered and the shudder chilled her to the heart. It was not terror that possessed her but something more unendurable than terror; it was the agony of a soul dwarfed by the immensity of the infinite. She was lonely, desperately lonely. In the midst of the women she was far from them. They began to speak and their voices were the voices of dreams.
Maire a Crick, speaking in Gaelic, was telling a story, while wringing the water from her clothes, the story of a barrow that came across the hills of Glenmornan in the year of the famine, and on the barrow, which rolled along of its own accord, there was a large coffin with a door at the bottom of it. Then another of the party told of her grandfather’s wake and the naked man who came to the house in the middle of the night and took up a seat by the chimney corner. He never spoke a word but smoked the pipe of tobacco that was handed to him. When the cock crew with the dawn he got up from his seat and went out and away. Nobody knew the man and no one ever saw him again.
“We might get shelter in one of the houses up there,” said Norah Ryan, rousing herself and pointing to the hill above, where the short-lived rushlights flickered and shone at intervals in the scattered cabins.
“We might,” said Maire a Crick, “we might indeed, but it’s not in me to go askin’ a night’s shelter under the roof of a Ballybonar man. There was once, years ago, a black word between the Ballybonar people and the people of our side of the water. Since then we haven’t darkened one another’s doorsteps, and we’re not going to do it now.”
“Maybe someone on our side will send a boat across,” said the beansho.
“Maybe they’ll do that if they’re not at the fishin’,” Judy Farrel answered. “And when are they not at the fishin’? They’re always out on the diddy of the sea and never catching a fish atall, atall!”
“We’ll walk about; it will keep our feet warm.”