The
people have so few images for description that they seize on
anything that is remarkable in their visitors and use it afterwards
in their talk.
For the last few years when they are speaking of any one with fine
rings they say: 'She had beautiful rings on her fingers like
Lady - ,' a visitor to the island.
I have been down sitting on the pier till it was quite dark. I am
only beginning to understand the nights of Inishmaan and the
influence they have had in giving distinction to these men who do
most of their work after nightfall.
I could hear nothing but a few curlews and other wild-fowl whistling
and shrieking in the seaweed, and the low rustling of the waves. It
was one of the dark sultry nights peculiar to September, with no
light anywhere except the phosphorescence of the sea, and an
occasional rift in the clouds that showed the stars behind them.
The sense of solitude was immense. I could not see or realise my own
body, and I seemed to exist merely in my perception of the waves and
of the crying birds, and of the smell of seaweed.
When I tried to come home I lost myself among the sandhills, and the
night seemed to grow unutterably cold and dejected, as I groped
among slimy masses of seaweed and wet crumbling walls.
After a while I heard a movement in the sand, and two grey shadows
appeared beside me. They were two men who were going home from
fishing. I spoke to them and knew their voices, and we went home
together.
In the autumn season the threshing of the rye is one of the many
tasks that fall to the men and boys. The sheaves are collected on a
bare rock, and then each is beaten separately on a couple of stones
placed on end one against the other. The land is so poor that a
field hardly produces more grain than is needed for seed the
following year, so the rye-growing is carried on merely for the
straw, which is used for thatching.
The stooks are carried to and from the threshing fields, piled on
donkeys that one meets everywhere at this season, with their black,
unbridled heads just visible beneath a pinnacle of golden straw.
While the threshing is going on sons and daughters keep turning up
with one thing and another till there is a little crowd on the
rocks, and any one who is passing stops for an hour or two to talk
on his way to the sea, so that, like the kelp-burning in the
summer-time, this work is full of sociability.
When the threshing is over the straw is taken up to the cottages and
piled up in an outhouse, or more often in a corner of the kitchen,
where it brings a new liveliness of colour.
