"rslcm10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yeats William Butler)

my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a
great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had
been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed
some mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my
mind, for the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part
of a teeming, fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointed
to a square ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newer
building under its lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and
almost deserted pier, and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical
Rose, I was possessed with the phantasy that the sea, which kept
covering it with showers of white foam, was claiming it as part of
some indefinite and passionate life, which had begun to war upon our
orderly and careful days, and was about to plunge the world into a
night as obscure as that which followed the downfall of the classical
world. One part of my mind mocked this phantastic terror, but the
other, the part that still lay half plunged in vision, listened to
the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at unimaginable
fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.

We had gone but a few paces along the pier when we came upon an old
man, who was evidently a watchman, for he sat in an overset barrel,
close to a place where masons had been lately working upon a break in
the pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung under
tinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say,
for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel,
and I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We had
passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters,
idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down
to Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for some
moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us.
'Are you not afraid,' I said, 'that these wild fishing people may do
some desperate thing against you?'

'I and mine,' he answered, 'are long past human hurt or help, being
incorporate with immortal spirits, and when we die it shall be the
consummation of the supreme work. A time will come for these people
also, and they will sacrifice a mullet to Artemis, or some other fish
to some new divinity, unless indeed their own divinities, the Dagda,
with his overflowing cauldron, Lug, with his spear dipped in poppy-
juice lest it rush forth hot for battle. Aengus, with the three birds
on his shoulder, Bodb and his red swineherd, and all the heroic
children of Dana, set up once more their temples of grey stone. Their
reign has never ceased, but only waned in power a little, for the
Sidhe still pass in every wind, and dance and play at hurley, and
fight their sudden battles in every hollow and on every hill; but
they cannot build their temples again till there have been martyrdoms
and victories, and perhaps even that long-foretold battle in the
Valley of the Black Pig.'

Keeping close to the wall that went about the pier on the seaward