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His voice had a peculiar jarring weight like the hoarse toll of an ancient rusty bell in an ivy-smothered tower.
The road was narrow, white, old, hard and scarred with shadow. It ran away westwards in the mist of the early morning, running cunningly through the little hills and going to some trouble to visit tiny towns which were not, strictly speaking, on its way.
I walked quietly for a good distance on this road, thinking my own thoughts with the front part of my brain and at the same time taking pleasure with the back part in the great and widespread finery of the morning. The air was keen, clear, abundant and intoxicating. Its powerful presence could be discerned everywhere, shaking up the green things jauntily, conferring greater dignity and definition on the stones and boulders, forever arranging and re-arranging the clouds and breathing life into the world. The sun had climbed steeply out of his hiding and was now standing benignly in the lower
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I slept there for a long time, as motionless and as devoid of feeling as the shadow of myself which slept behind me.
He sat there looking very vexed with himself and stayed for a while without talking behind a little grey wall he had built for himself by means of his pipe.
I went over and felt it and covered it with my hand to see how big its smallness was.
Makes me laugh every time.
The Sergeant spat spits on the dry road.
‘Your talk,’ I said, ‘is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.’
‘Now take a sheep,’ the Sergeant said. ‘What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?’
The house was quiet in itself and silent but a canopy of lazy smoke had been erected over the chimney to indicate that people were within engaged on tasks. Ahead of us went the road, running swiftly across the flat land and pausing slightly to climb slowly up a hill that was waiting for it in a place where there was tall grass, grey boulders and rank stunted trees. The whole overhead was occupied by the sky, serene, impenetrable, ineffable and incomparable, with a fine island of clouds anchored in the calm two yards to the right of Mr Jarvis’s outhouse.
you would know how certain the sureness of certainty is.’
It was always there and MacCruiskeen is certain that it was there even before that.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘we will go out and have a look at it, it is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable.’ The sounds he put on these words were startling and too strange. Each word seemed to rest on a tiny cushion and was soft and far away from every other word. When he had stopped speaking there was a warm enchanted silence as if the last note of some music too fascinating almost for comprehension had receded and disappeared long before its absence was truly noticed.
I looked blankly and carefully everywhere, seeing for a time no difference between any different things, inspecting methodically every corner of the same unchanging sameness.
‘It is a fine day in any case,’ he was saying. His words, now in the air and out of doors, had another warm breathless roundness in them as if his tongue was lined with furry burrs and they came lightly from him like a string of bubbles or like tiny things borne to me on thistledown in very gentle air.
