Stones of Aran

by Tim Robinson

  Primarily, these crags are steeped in sunsets. The best of my memories of them are sunset coloured. Some years after leaving Aran I returned with two friends who were making a film and needed a sunset. I led them to the brink of a terrace on the north-west shoulder of the island. The sun, on a rococo stage of lavishly gilded cirrus, was retiring with the bravura of a diva well practiced in farewell performances. But in the last minutes it dispensed with meretricious pomps, and reduced itself to a white-hot cutting-disc. As it poised itself to slice into the horizon, I remembered what I had read of the rare phenomenon called “the green flash”: When the sun’s rays enter the atmosphere obliquely they are refracted earthwards, and so at sunset they are bent round the curve of the earth a little, making the sun visible for a few moments when, geometrically speaking it is already below the horizon; and since the longer wavelengths of the red end of the spectrum are refracted to a slightly lesser degree than the shorter ones, they are cut off first, and the very last glimpse of the sun is provided solely by yellow and blue light; thus, in ideal conditions, its disappearance is illuminated by an instant of emerald. This evening, conditions seemed to promise that ideal; the atmosphere was intently still, the sky around the vanishing-point of day was as lucid as science. We “inspectors of sunsets” held our breaths, and trained the camera on the sun as it shrank to a low dome, which appeared to spread a little way along the horizon to either side before gathering itself into a globule of fierce intensity, and vanishing. We saw no emerald; the sky shed its gold, the crags faded from copper to gun-metal, without spectral discontinuities. But, most unexpectedly, when we reviewed that day’s work in the darkroom, there was the green moment in all its veridicity. Sadly, this epiphany like so many others ended on the cutting-room floor; in the final restructuring, the film’s editor foreswore the clichéd closure of sunset.

  However, it is a sunset that defines these crags for me still, and dresses them for this book. It dawned out of a dark evening in that summer, a wretched rainy season, when we were living temporarily above Creig an Chéirín while I made my first map of the island. Evening after evening I used to come back from the boreens, soaked and frustrated, to the damp cottage in which M had spent the day trying to dry out the clothes I had worn the day before. The cottage was lonely, surrounded by tall wet grass and puddles of cow-shit. By day the front windows looked down a grey slope to a grey sea, the back windows up a grey slope to a grey sky, by night we shuttered them up so as not to attract the attention of the only likely caller, a roaming bachelor half-crazed by lifelong fantasizing. We were befriended by an eight-year-old child whom we, still only half familiar with Aran’s genealogical nicknames, knew as Mikey Mikey Tom Mikey. He used to cycle out from some distance away with a milk-pail before and after school, to see to cattle and sheep on the land his parents rented near the cottage. He too was frequently wet and exhausted, and M would supplement the bit of bread his mother had, as he put it, “thrown down in the pail” for him with cocoa and a boiled egg. He called in on her now and again, bringing an orphaned robin nestling, or to ask her to tell him if the cows started climbing up on each other, so that he would know when to take them to the bull. Once the school holidays began he was often labouring all day, milking the three cows morning and evening, weeding mangolds, saving hay or spraying potatoes, all by himself and with little to eat or drink. (He was probably one of the last of Aran’s children to be worked in this way, which was only what their own experience had taught his parents to consider natural; we noted in later years that his younger brothers had an easier life, as modern values began to soften even this obdurately old-fashioned family.) Mikey offered to leave milk for us at the roadside below the cottage each morning in an old lemonade bottle; when we asked him the price he said, “Fifteen or ten pence,” but it was clear from the way he held them unseeingly in his palm that the coins meant nothing to him. We agreed on five pence, and arranged to return the empty bottle with the money in its cap to the same spot by the roadside. Sometimes he called on me to help him change the cattle from one field to another, which was difficult for him to do on his own, as the number of ways half a dozen beasts can go astray in the ramifying paths of Aran when driven from behind by one small boy is virtually infinite; also, although he was far quicker than I at “knocking the gap” to let the cattle into the field and raising it up again after them, the big stones were a strain on him. On such occasions he would tell me not to leave any pennies in the milk-bottle cap the next day because I had done that work for him, and I would explain that since I wanted to learn that work from him there was no need to pay me. He was supposed to be saving the money for new shoes, but in the event he bought two goat-kids from one of his contemporaries, and built a little stone hutch for them on a nearby crag. Mikey Mikey Tom Mikey was the only entrepreneur in that lugubrious neighbourhood, whose few remaining inhabitants seemed to be either moribund or manic.

  One evening, as I arrived home from a long day largely spent sheltering under inadequate bushes, the dripping sky suddenly cleared, and after dinner I sat on the doorstep with M to bask in the honeyed evening air. Then Mikey appeared, looking worried; his father was coming to ship some sheep out to An tOileán Iarthach the next morning, but in the meantime they had escaped from the crag they were supposed to be on. Reluctantly I got up to help him find them. We located a few on a crag towards Bun Gabhla, and chased after some others that showed briefly on a skyline, but they turned out not to be the right ones. It seemed absurd to be scampering about after sheep that would surely disappear again overnight if we did find them and put them back on their crag. We decided to split up; he went down towards the shore, I roved sunsetwards over the great shoulders of rock below Bun Gabhla. The golden eye of the lighthouse was opening and shutting. I became elated by the vast level tide-race of sunshine streaming around me, a light so palpable it might have been imagined by someone blind from birth, a warm liquid pressing in at the eyes, carrying sharp exciting crystals. I began to run, crossing the areas chopped up by shadow-filled grykes as easily as the great burnished rock-sheets, and leaping down the scarps from terrace to terrace as if the light were dissolving them and I could plunge through them like waves. If sheep were the goal of the quest, they hid themselves from my ecstasy and left me free to exult in the miraculous surety of my footfalls.

  Looking back on it from this moment of writing, I believe I have transcribed this experience accurately. But, arising where it does in these last pages, it needs to be freed from a weight of significance. It took place early in my learning about Aran; it does not represent a summation, a reading, of the work I have done since, a hard-won adequation of step to stone. Only my favouring of spatial over temporal continuity, my childish filling-in of the island-shape with one long obsessive scribble of record and experience, brings it to occupy this privileged site. Unearned, promising nothing beyond the moment of itself, least of all was it a mystic flight above or from the ground of this book. What could be more natural than that space should reward me for my fidelity by providing this excursus from time, just where it would come in handy many years of writing later?

  Meanwhile, Mikey had found a few more sheep. By the time I joined up with him again and we had driven them up to the crag and frightened them into jumping the wall into it, the sun had gone down. We spotted some more sheep on a higher crag, but decided to leave them there, and he set off homewards, dwindling down the hill on his bicycle. A full moon appeared between bars of cloud in the east as I climbed the path to the cottage, to find that M had been worried by my long absence, and, after her lonely day, disappointed of our evening together. So the episode ended sadly.

  Indeed I have been gone far too long about this island (but see, my darling, the book I have found you among its stones!). And now, have I reached the end of it so soon? With so little seen, less understood, nothing possessed? Not quite, it seems, for at this last moment something comes into view to the west. Perhaps it is just a patch of foam kicked up by dolphins, perhaps it
is the material of a postscript to my Aran …

  IV. POSTSCRIPT

  THE LESSER ARAN

  From the Isles of Aran and the west continent, often appears visible that inchanted island called O’Brasil, and in Irish Beg-ara, or the Lesser Aran, set down in cards of navigation. Whether it be reall and firm land, kept hidden by speciall ordinance of God, as the terrestriall paradise, or else some illusion of airy clouds appearing on the surface of the sea, or the craft of evill spirits, is more than our judgements can sound out.

  What Roderic O’Flaherty writes as O’Brasil is more correctly Hy Brazil or Hy Breasail, hy being from the old Norse ey, island, and breasail an Irish word for reddish substances such as raddle, rouge and even blood, sharing an obscure etymology with “brazil wood,” the red dye-wood from which Brazil was named. “Beg-Ara” is now Ára Beag or Árainn Bheag, Little Aran, in local tradition. From fourteenth-century Catalan maps down to a chart of 1865, Hy Breasail drifts about off the west coast of Ireland like flotsam from the wreck of Atlantis. According to a Dutch map of O’Flaherty’s time it was at the Porcupine Bank, some hundred miles west of Aran, but locally it was thought to be nearer than that, as his account shows:

  There is now living, Morogh O’Ley, who immagines he was himself personally in O’Brazil for two days, and saw out of it the iles of Aran, Golamhead, Irrosbeghill, and other places of the west continent he was acquainted with. The manner of it he relates, that being in Irrosainhagh [Iorras Aintheach, the Carna peninsula in south Connemara], in the month of Aprill, Anno Domini 1668, going alone from one village to another, in a melancholy humour, upon some discontent of his wife, he was encountered by two or three strangers, and forcibly carried by boat into O’Brazil, as such as were within it told him, and they could speak both English and Irish. He was ferried out hoodwink’d, in a boat, as he immagins, till he was left on the sea point by Galway; where he lay in a friend’s house for some dayes after, being very desperately ill, and knowes not how he came to Galway then. But, by that means, about seaven or eight years after, he began to practise both chirurgery and phisick, and so continues ever since to practise, tho’ he never studyed nor practised either in his life before, as all we that knew him since he was a boy can averr.

  This story still exists in the oral realm, and surfaces in print now and again. In 1839 O’Donovan recorded a version with an additional detail that rounds out its sense. Lee, as he calls its hero, was among the crew of a fishing boat; they landed on an island they did not know, and were turned off it by a man who told them it was enchanted. As they were going away the islander gave Lee a book, with directions not to look into it for seven years. He complied, and having read the book seven years later, was able to practise surgery and medicine. The book, O’Donovan was told, had been passed down through Lee’s descendents but had very recently been sold to a Dublin bookseller.

  In fact this “Book of O’Brasil” is a reality, and soon found its way into the library of the Royal Irish Academy. It is a fifteenth-century medical manuscript in Irish and Latin, with lists of diseases, symptoms, cures, etc., arranged in columns under such headings as Prognostics, Causa, Signum and Evacuatio. The Lees were hereditary physicians to the O’Flahertys in olden times, and Roderic O’Flaherty’s editor, Hardiman, conjectures that the truth of the matter is that Lee, having lost his patrimony in the Cromwellian confiscations, dusted off his ancestors’ old book, invented his O’Brasil adventure to advertise himself, and set up as a quack.

  No such cynicism has been allowed to impede the development of the tale in its birthplace. In 1938 a collector for the Irish Folklore Commission took down an elaborate version of it from a well-known story-teller living near Carna. It begins with a customary rigmarole:

  Long ago, and a long time it was. If I were there then, I wouldn’t be there now. If I were there then and now, I would have a new story or an old story, or I would have no story at all.

  Then we are told exactly where Lee lived, in Letterdeskert just west of Carna, and where he tied up his boat in nearby Cornarone. One day when he was sailing to Galway, the boat touched bottom in a place where he had never heard talk of there being a rock; he looked over the side and saw heather growing, but when he touched this land with the croisín he had for gathering seaweed, it vanished. Soon afterwards he was menaced by three huge waves, each of which he quelled by throwing a sod of turf at it. Then came an even bigger wave. He pulled out his pocketknife, opened it, and flung it at the wave; the sea fell calm again, and he completed his voyage.

  A good while later, Lee was cutting heather for cattle-bedding on the hillside above his home, when he felt sleepy and faint, and was carried off through the air. He found himself in the house of an old man, the king of Little Aran. The old man took him upstairs and showed him the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, lying in bed, moaning and complaining about the knife plunged into her right breast. Lee was filled with remorse when he saw that it was his own knife; he pulled it out, and she rose up as well as she had ever been. “Now,” said the old man, “you had better marry this woman and stay here with us.” But Lee explained that, being an only son, he had to stay at home until his sisters were settled. So they rewarded him with a book instead, which if he did not open it for seven years would make him the best doctor under the sun. Then he was magically returned to the hillside, walked down home, threw the basket of heather into the cowhouse, and put the book away.

  For three years he resisted all suggestions that he open the book, but then a dear cousin of his fell ill, and he was persuaded to look out a cure for him. He found the remedy, but only three years’ share of the knowledge in the book was readable; the rest of the pages had melted and turned as black as soot. However, that was enough to make him the best doctor in Ireland. Doctor Lee finally left Letterdeskert and travelled before him, curing both lowly and noble. He never returned, and it is supposed that he must have gone off to live with the beautiful woman of Little Aran.

  This story is quite true. I know the townland of Cornarone. I was often there. I know where Lee had his house and where he used to moor his boat. It isn’t many years since he lived there. “Tis a true story, indeed, that happened in Carna in Conamara.

  According to Aran islanders I have talked to, tradition holds that Árainn Bheag appears (or “dries,” like a shoal when the tide is very low) every seven years. Some Inis Meáin people, I am told, have seen the clothes laid out in the sun on its bleaching-green. If you could row out to it without taking your eyes off it, not even to blink, or if you could throw a spark of fire onto it, it would be yours. Alternatively, as the tales of it imply, it comes to the one who accepts its invitation graciously—and if Little Aran has fallen into the hands of a Connemara man, the Araners have only their own diffidence to blame. A currach crew from Iaráirne landed on it once, and were approached three times by a red-haired beauty who said each time, “Am I not a fine woman?” The third time, one of the men, Tadhg Ó Neachtáin, was bold enough to reply, “Arragh, how would we know that—fine or not fine?,” whereupon she flung a handful of mud between his eyes, and he came home blind. A similar story was told to Lady Gregory in 1898 by a man from Inis Meáin:

  There’s said to be another island out there that’s enchanted, and there are some that see it. And it’s said that a fisherman landed on it one time, and he saw a little house, and he went in, and a very nice-looking young woman came out and said, “What will you say to me?” and he said, “You are a very nice lady.” And a second came and asked him the same thing and a third, and he made the same answer. And after that they said, “You’d best run of your life,” and he did, and his curragh was floating along and he had but just time to get into it, and the island was gone. But if he had said “God bless you,” the island would have been saved.

  While I have not met any islander who claims to have seen Árainn Bheag, never mind landed on it, I have talked to one who has dreamed of seeing it, Dara Ó Conaola (but Dara is a writer, and so an unreliable dreamer). In his d
ream he was on the shore when it appeared, and he was glad that his brother came up behind him and saw it too, for otherwise nobody would have believed him. It was an island of two hills, with a tower at either end, and, he told me, it filled up that awful space out to the south-west, giving him a feeling of security.

  But that was only a dream, and the dream of a mirage at that. In reality Pangaea is broken, and all the mystic bits and pieces circulating in the slow vortices of Panthallassa—Atlantis, the Land of Youth, Maol Dúin’s islands—have foundered, dragging down their rainbows. Now and again, perhaps once in seven years, some “illusion of airy clouds” tricks us back into that sense of security. The deep truths of myth act on me less than their deep falsities; recognitions of the latter are the cruel blades that facet the world like living crystal. That one’s dwelling-place in the world can be possessed as by patriarchal marriage, that there is somewhere a book containing what one needs to know, that the wound can be cured by plucking out the knife—these are some of the illusions proposed by the Lesser Aran.