Under the sun, there is a white glinting of lakes away across the plain, where brown and purple are blended with green in broad spaces of mingling color.  To the west the ground rises again into hills crowded behind each other, sombre masses, for ages called the Mountains of Storms.  Far beyond them, vague as blue cloud-wreaths in the blue, are the hills that guard our western ocean.  From their sunset-verges the land draws near again, in the long range of the Mayo cliffs,—­fierce walls of rock that bar the fiercer ocean from a wild world of storm-swept uplands.  The cliffs gradually lessen, and their colors grow clearer, till they sink at last toward the sand-banks of Ballysadare, divided from us only by a channel of shallow sea.

The whole colored circle of sea and land, of moor and mountain, is full of the silence of intense and mighty power.  The ocean is tremulous with the breath of life.  The mountains, in their stately beauty, rise like immortals in the clear azure.  The signs of our present works are dwarfed to insignificance.

Everywhere within that wide world of hill and plain, and hardly less ancient than the hills themselves, are strewn memorials of another world that has vanished, sole survivors of a long-hidden past.  A wordless history is written there, in giant circles of stone and cromlechs of piled blocks, so old that in a land of most venerable tradition their very legend has vanished away.

Close under us lies Carrowmore, with its labyrinth of cromlechs and stone circles, a very city of dead years.  There is something awe-inspiring in the mere massiveness of these piled and ordered stones, the visible boundaries of invisible thoughts; that awe is deepened by the feeling of the tremendous power lavished in bringing them here, setting them up in their ordered groups, and piling the crowns of the cromlechs on other only less gigantic stones; awe gives place to overwhelming mystery when we can find no kinship to our own thoughts and aims in their stately grouping.  We are in presence of archaic purposes recorded in a massive labyrinth, purposes darkly hidden from us in the unknown.

There are circles of huge boulders ranged at equal distances, firmly set upright in the earth.  They loom vast, like beads of a giant necklace on the velvet grass.  There are cromlechs set alone—­a single huge boulder borne aloft in the air on three others of hardly less weight.  There are cromlechs set in the midst of titanic circles of stone, with lesser boulders guarding the cromlechs closer at hand.  There are circles beside circles rising in their grayness, with the grass and heather carpeting their aisles.  There they rest in silence, with the mountain as their companion, and, beyond the mountain, the ever-murmuring sea.

Thus they have kept their watch through long dark ages.  When sunrise reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over the burnished grass.  From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow gigantic or draw together into mere blots of darkness.  When day declines, the shadows come forth again, joining ghostly hands from stone to stone, from circle to circle, under the sunset sky, and merging at last into the universal realm of night.  Thus they weave their web, inexorable as tireless Time.