Cold and hunger and weariness: these only did not vary.
But at last the long weary exile on the Sea of Moyle came to an end. One day Fionula told her brothers that on the morrow they would have to fly far westward, for the three hundred years on the sea-stream of the Moyle were over, and now they had to begin their long and mayhap still more bitter, bleak, and mournful exile on the wild western ocean beyond Erin.
“We must fly straight to the bleak headland of Irros Domnann,” she said, “and then must remain on the wild and desolate seas off the isle of Glora, the island that is farthest away from the mainland of our beloved Erin.”
Thither, accordingly, the four swans flew on the morrow. It was with joy that they left the sea of the Moyle, where they had known so much privation and misery; but little cause had they for joy, for not less bleak were the skies, not less desolate the coasts, not less wild the storm-lashed, rain-swept seas, off the lifeless, barren isle of Glora. The great waves of the shoreless western ocean beat upon it for ever, and their thunder often filled the darkness for countless leagues with a sound most dreadful to hear.
But after many years it chanced that a young man, named Ebric, the son of a Dedannan lord, came to farm a tract of land lying along the shore of Irros Domnann. This youth, who was a poet, and loved all beautiful things, soon cared more for the sweet, wonderful singing of the four swans, which often he heard, and to see their white bodies glistening in the sun, than to till his land.
One day Fionula and her brothers descried him. Flying to the shore, they called, and great was his wonder to hear the dear familiar Gaelic speech in the mouths of wild swans.
From that time he walked daily down to the extreme rocks on the shore, that he might converse with the children of Lir, and hear all they had to tell of their sad story; though he, on his part, could relate little to them of what had happened, or was happening further inland in Erin, though they heard from him with sorrow that the Milesians were now mightier than the Dedannans, and that the Fairy Host was no longer able to withstand the might of these enemies who long since had come out of the south.
“For,” he said, “it is the way of what is beautiful and wonderful; that the wonder passes and the beauty fades.”
That night he heard Fionula singing, and knew that the burden of her song was no other than the saying he had uttered:
Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,