United States or Gabon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Our progress was so slow that clouds came up with a rise in the wind before we reached the shore, and rain began to fall in large single drops. The black curagh working slowly through this world of grey, and the soft hissing of the rain gave me one of the moods in which we realise with immense distress the short moment we have left us to experience all the wonder and beauty of the world.
She told her dream in the morning, and an old man said it was of Aran she was after dreaming. 'She brought her son down by the coast of Galway, and came out in a curagh, and landed below where you see a bit of a cove. 'She walked up then to the house of my father God rest his soul and she told them what she was looking for.
'Last week they were taking him to Clare and the whole lot of them were near drownded. Another day he went to Inisheer and they broke three ribs of the curagh, and they coming back. There is not the like of him for ill-luck in the three islands. 'The divil choke your old gob, said the man, 'you will be talking. We set off.
'Where is your bag? His curagh had got a bad place near the bow of the steamer, so I was slung down from a considerable height on top of some sacks of flour and my own bag, while the curagh swayed and battered itself against the side. When we were clear I asked Michael if he had got my letter. 'Ah no, he said, 'not a sight of it, but maybe it will come next week.
'It will not be coming soon or at all to-night, she said. 'The wind has gone up now, and there will come no curagh to this island for maybe two days or three. And wasn't it a cruel thing to see the haste was on them, and they in danger all the time to be drowned themselves? Then I asked her how the woman was doing.
They tested the braces of the oars, and the oarpins, and everything in the curagh with a care I had not seen them give to anything, then my bag was lifted in, and we were ready. Besides the four men of the crew a man was going with us who wanted a passage to this island. As he was scrambling into the bow, an old man stood forward from the crowd. 'Don't take that man with you, he said.
Every few hundred yards one of the rowers had to stop and bail, but the hole did not increase. When we were about half way across the sound we met a curagh coming towards us with its sails set. After some shouting in Gaelic, I learned that they had a packet of letters and tobacco for myself. We sidled up as near as was possible with the roll, and my goods were thrown to me wet with spray.
The body of a young man who was drowned a few weeks ago came ashore this morning, and his friends have been busy all day making a coffin in the yard of the house where he lived. After a while the curagh went out of sight into the mist, and I came down to the cottage shuddering with cold and misery. The old woman was keening by the fire.
The danger of his life on the sea gives him the alertness of the primitive hunter, and the long nights he spends fishing in his curagh bring him some of the emotions that are thought peculiar to men who have lived with the arts. As Michael is busy in the daytime, I have got a boy to come up and read Irish to me every afternoon.
When the curagh was in safety the two old women were carried up through the surf and slippery seaweed on the backs of their sons. In this broken weather a curagh cannot go out without danger, yet accidents are rare and seem to be nearly always caused by drink, Since I was here last year four men have been drowned on their way home from the large island.
Word Of The Day