He then discovered that the fiend's face was smooth and fat, and shining, with a pair of round black eyes, which seemed to be embedded in the flesh. The lower part of it was chiefly remarkable for the enormous size of the mouth, which literally stretched from ear to ear. It was a batrachian sort of face and would have reminded Hugh of a frog's, only that he had never seen a frog in his life, there being none in Ireland at that time. It was not a particularly malicious face. The mouth, big as it was, did not show any immediate desire to eat him up. On the contrary, its expression was chiefly remarkable for a look of intense self-admiration. The gigantic lips were distended with what appeared to be a permanent smile of complacency. Catching Hugh's glance, the monster nodded affably at him with an air of patronage, the air of one who wishes to put an inferior at his ease and to diminish as far as is possible that awe which the sight of his own dignity naturally inspires.
“Then it is not afraid, you need be, young Sassenach,* so it is not,” he said in a thin, chirruping voice, which sounded like an exaggerated bat's squeak. “It is myself you see before you, myself and no other man — Flann MacFogartach, called of the foolish Flann-na-Pus,** leech and purse-bearer to Cormac Cas, who is the Ollamh*** of Morogh Na d-Tuagh O'Flaherty, of Morogh Na d-Tuagh, the greatest, grandest man in all the world, and Cormac Cas the second greatest. Yes, it is myself, Flann MacFogartach, and no other man. And it was good of me, very good to come to you, only that I could not have done different, seeing that I am come by the order of Beara, the daughter of Cormac Cas, who in her graciousness has sent you this.”
(* Saxon, Englishman; ** Flann of the Mouth; *** Master of particular trade.)
He lifted a small noggin which he held in his hand, stirring it at the same time with a stick, so that a steam began to arise. Terror for the moment had kept Hugh's hunger at bay. The sight of food was all that was wanted, however, to bring it back. To accept food from so doubtful a source must have a deadly effect, he was well aware, upon a man's soul, but even so he could not refrain. The devil, if this was the devil, or one of his emissaries, would find an easy bargain of him tonight. He stretched out his hand and took the noggin, which the monster surrendered with another affable grin. Inside was something of the nature of porridge, made of oats and boiled to a pulp. A spoon — or a piece of wood which bore some faint resemblance to a spoon — was sticking upright in it. Hugh took the piece of wood. To imperil your immortal soul is, no doubt, a very serious matter, but not so bad as to go to sleep over such a void as that.
He had got it up to his mouth when he was startled afresh by a cry, or rather shrill squeak, on the part of the monster. He dropped it in all haste and started back, filled with new dismay. It was only a summons, however, as he perceived, to the big woman outside — one which she evidently understood, for she proceeded to fix the torch into the ground by its pointed end, then, creeping through the entrance, appeared inside, bringing with her a small “mether”* full of milk, which she handed to the prisoner. Thirsty as he was, the woman's eyes attracted him for an instant. She gazed at him with a dreary leaden-eyed gaze, which seemed to see nothing. Then, moving back a little, she squatted down upon the earth, her bare legs outstretched, her back against the wattles, in an attitude of immovability, which seemed calculated to last all night.
(* Drinking cup, square-shaped at the top and rounded at the bottom.)
Under these circumstances, Hugh ate and drank, the monster and his female companion gazing at him meantime, one with those piteous eyes which seemed to observe nothing, the other with his peculiar smirk of complacency and with eyes keen and watchful as those of a weasel. When he had finished the contents of the noggin and had drunk up every drop of the milk, his two visitors rose and departed. Flann-na-Pus waddled first, with the facility of one to whom a roof considerably less than five feet from the ground is not a matter of the slightest inconvenience. Then his gigantic companion followed more slowly, creeping laboriously backwards on her hands and knees. The last thing that Hugh saw of them were those patient, long-suffering eyes of hers, gazing up at him from that uncomfortable position. He fell asleep again soon afterwards, and his dreams this time were of wolves and hairy mountain fiends, and hideous long-armed goblins.
Chapter III.
Four hours later, he was awakened again, this time by an appalling noise. Shriek upon shriek, shriek upon shriek, resounded through the darkness, or rather through the first faint precursor of daylight. He started up in terror. The clamour was penetrating, ear-splitting; only those who have heard a number of women — a whole village full of them — scream together at the utmost pitch of their united lungs will be able to judge what that sound was like. It was not only ear-piercing, but it was soul-scaring. It curdled Hugh's blood, and sent shivers of discomfort up and down the middle of his spinal marrow. Without knowing what it was all about, he sprang up and groped his way to the door of the hut, which he found to be this time only loosely fastened. He pushed it open and looked cautiously out in the direction from whence the sounds came.
And there he saw a curious sight. The valley was something like a trough or narrow basin lying in the hollow of the mountains, one end of it being nearly closed by the steep rock wall in the middle of which the trap-door yawned, and which was approached from below by the staircase up which Hugh had climbed. A cold white dawn was slowly breaking over the mountains, making everything seem ghostly and unreal. A few stars still twinkled in the western sky, a red planet just showing between two black peaks of rock, while a veil of mist which hung over everything seemed to be suspended across the ends of the valley like a gigantic spider's web. Breaking through this web, figures of women were to be seen hurrying down to this mouth of the glen — vague figures, from each of which, as it emerged from its own hut, there burst these shrill screams, which filled the glen and seemed to rise up into the cold, remote sky.
Hugh wondered what they could all be about and in his curiosity advanced a little further, seeing that no one seemed to take any heed of what he did. By-and-by, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he began to perceive that other figures were coming, one after the other, up the stairs and emerging through the trap-door at the top. These were not women, but men — big savage fellows, looking perfectly gigantic in the mist. One after the other, they mounted until there were forty or fifty collected at the top. They did not move on, but waited where they were, as if expecting someone else to appear from below.
At last, the uprising ceased. The men who had mounted drew into two groups on either side of the passage. The women, who were by this time silent, waited too, evidently in expectation. Then appeared a new figure, advancing this time not forwards but backwards, his hands supporting something which he was lifting carefully up the rocky stairs. He was followed by another man supporting the same thing from below. Hugh could now faintly distinguish that this something was stiff and straight, and that a pair of feet stretched out horizontally before it — a corpse. Another bearer followed and another corpse, and after that, two more bearers with a third corpse between them. Then the three corpses were borne slowly away up the valley, the women falling in behind them and renewing their shrill shrieks and screams as they did so.
Hugh retreated towards the door of his hut as they approached. Slowly, the troop swept along up the narrow, rock-encompassed valley, the women's cries being more in unison than before. It looked as ghastly a procession as could well be imagined under those twinkling stars, lit by that first grey, glimmering uncertain light of morning. Though he had every reason to think that it was only the men of the village returning from some foray and bringing their dead with them, Hugh felt his blood grow cold under his skin and his flesh creep as he watched it coming nearer and nearer. He would have liked to escape under cover of the darkness and get away to the mountains before it reached the village. He did not do so, simply because there was nowhere for him to get to. If he had run away, he would have had nothing for it but to come back as soon as he got hungry or else fall into the ha
nds of other savages, worse perhaps even than these. He remained where he was, therefore, only retreating a little into the darkness of the hut and from there peeping furtively out through the wattles.
Hugh Gaynard retreated to his wet hay and sat there for some time watching the drops gather upon the sods overhead and fall in big black tears upon his feet and legs. He did not feel like sleeping again. His ears still rang with those shrieks, which seemed to be vibrating in every corner of his brain. That row of bloody corpses close at hand was disturbing, too, and kept him restless. As a matter of fact, however, he did fall asleep again and slept soundly for two or three hours.
Chapter IV.
When Hugh awoke for the third time, it was broad daylight, and the rain seemed to be over for the present. He clambered out of his unpleasant lair, which was now thoroughly soaked through, and moved shiveringly over to the door. Someone had secured it while he was asleep, but there was no difficulty on this side in seeing between the chinks, which were only filled with dead moss, some of which he pulled away, so as to be able to look out more clearly. Hitherto his impressions had been more or less those of a dream — a remarkably bad dream — but now with returning daylight he would be able, he thought, to see what sort of a place he really had got into.
All around the hut lay a space of puddled earth, black as any bog hole and starred at intervals with big pools. Where that ended, the heather began at once. He could see it stretching away before him, twinkling over with millions of rain-drops, or broken here and there with lichen-covered boulders, till the edge of his chink hindered him from seeing any further. He moved to the next one and looked out again.
Immediately opposite to the door of his own hut was the entrance to a similar hut. It seemed to be larger than the one he was in, and the door stood wide open, so that he could see figures moving to and fro inside. Looking closely into the half-darkness, he could further distinguish the figure of a man laid upon his back in the centre of the hut, with his arms stretched stiffly out upon either side. This he concluded to be one of the corpses he had seen in the night and was confirmed in the supposition by observing that, though it was now broad daylight, torches were burning in the cabin, one on either side of the prostrate figure. Outside, close to the entrance, two women were squatting upon the ground. One of these he recognised as the uncouth giantess, the companion of the monster who had visited him in the night; the other was an older woman, whom he had not seen before.
He was still peering at them when three other women came up and proceeded to squat themselves silently down in the same place. These were all three very old creatures, hags of incalculable age and amazing ugliness, their skinny necks and sparsely-covered heads giving them much the look of a trio of elderly cormorants. Then another old woman, this time a fat one, waddled up and also squatted down on the ground, and after her another and another, till there were a dozen seated upon the mud about the entrance, all evidently waiting for some event or ceremony in which they were to bear a part.
Hugh watched them from his chink, wondering what they were going to do, wondering, too, with no little anxiety whether he was going to have any breakfast. He had almost forgotten his terrors of the night before, his anxiety being now chiefly concentrated upon two questions: first, was he likely to get any food? secondly, what were his chances of making his escape from this place altogether?
Suddenly, he perceived a commotion which seemed to ran through the village. He could hear a confused noise of voices in the direction of the entrance of the valley. He ran to that side of his hut, but there were fewer chinks here, so that he was unable to see clearly what was going on. A couple of young men, evidently just awake, came yawning to the door of another hut a little lower down and looked in the direction of the entrance. Then one said something hastily to the other, and both began rapidly buckling on their bolts, evidently with the intention of going out. The row of squatting hags upon the ground had their heads all turned also towards the entrance of the valley and were craning their necks forward and chattering to one another in low, guttural tones.
The two young men came out of the hut and hastened away. Hugh could hear other steps, as if the occupants of all the huts were moving in the same direction. Presently, as the noise of footsteps died away, he was able to make out a word or two of what the old women were saying to one another. “Muredagh! Muredagh!” he heard them say; then “Cormac Cas! Cormac Cas!” repeated many times in tones of eager anticipation.
Muredagh was a new name to Hugh, but with that of Cormac Cas he was perfectly familiar. Everyone upon the banks of Lough Corrib and for miles around it knew the name of Cormac Cas and all about him. He was the Ollamh — in other words, the lawyer, bard, and chief adviser of Morogh Na d-Tuagh O'Flaherty, lord and chief of the whole clan and country of the O'Flahertys from sea to sea. Marvellous tales were told of Cormac Cas' powers. He was said to understand what the birds told one another as they flew through the air, and the fishes as they whispered at the bottoms of the streams. He could make what weather he chose and keep it at the same point, too, for as long or short a time as he chose. He had a familiar spirit which took the form of an one-eyed trout, living in the stream that ran under Morogh Na d-Tuagh's castle of Aughnanure. He could curse anyone against whom he had a spite with a curse so withering and all-pervading, that no priest in all Connacht, not the Bishop of Killaloe himself, could ever take that curse off again. Trying to recall what more he had heard, Hugh remembered that he had been told that Cormac Cas' own part of the tribe were kept quite distinct from the rest of the O'Flahertys, and that they, with their wives and families, lived in a hollow place above Maam Tore, a place which opened only when Cormac Cas ordered it to do so and would close up again at his orders — a place, so the story ran, into which it was fatal for anyone to get save with Cormac Cas' leave, and out of which no human being, not an O'Flaherty born, had ever stepped alive. Drifting recollections came back to him of still more cheerful tales than these — tales of prisoners carried up there and never seen again; of corpses, charred and horribly mutilated, found lying about on the rocks below Maam Tore; of grisly sacrifices, no doubt to black-faced mountain deities, accompanied by cannibal feast and other heathen performances. There were no end to similar tales about the doings of Cormac Cas and his belongings, many of which had been related in his hearing with the most minute and satisfying details around the armour-room fire.
Hugh's blood ran cold in his veins as he reflected that the place in which he stood must be the very hollow in question. If so, Heaven help him indeed! He was undone assuredly and had nothing left now but to begin to think upon his prayers!
He had not much time in which to anticipate his coming fate, for the steps were now returning. He strained his eyes to the crack, but for some time could see nothing. Suddenly, a number of men poured into the space between the two huts, obliging the old women to get up and scuttle hurriedly out of the way to avoid being trodden on. The centre of this group was an immensely tall man, tall even for a Connacht highlander, a man several inches over six feet high and broad in proportion. He was dressed in a close-fitting suit of flannel, with wolf-skin leggings reaching down to his ankles, and a great dark cloak slung about his shoulders. His head was bare but protected by the usual glibbe,* which in his case was already iron-grey, giving him an extraordinarily close resemblance to an elderly wolf. Indeed, the whole group, as it came round the corner and swept into the open space, was like nothing so much as a pack of wolves tearing along with its leader in its midst.
(* A thick mass of matted hair on the forehead and over the eyes.)
For some minutes, the chorus of voices was deafening. The younger men, who had arrived in the morning, were evidently explaining to the man with the grey glibbe what had occurred. He stood perfectly silent in the midst of them, his dark eyes roving slowly from right to left, with a peculiarly piercing and at the same time sullen expression. First, his glance swept the whole encampment, then it rested for a moment upon the hut imm
ediately in front of him. Suddenly, he lifted his head, and his hand went up with a quick authoritative gesture. Thereupon all tongues ceased buzzing. A movement was visible inside the hut, and from the entrance of it stepped out the woman called Beara.
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