It was on a Thursday, the first of May, and the seventeenth day of the moon, that the Milesians arrived in Ireland; and as he set his right foot on the soil of it, Amargin chanted this poem: 

     I am the wave of the Ocean;
     I am the murmur of the billow;
     I am the ox of the seven combats;
     I am the vuture upon the rock;
     I am a tear of the sun;
     I am the fairest of plants;
     I am a wild boar in valor;
     I am a salmon in the water;
     I am a lake in the plain;
     I am a word of science;
     I am the spear-point that gives battle;
     I am the god who creates in the head the fire of thought. 
     Who is it that enlightens the assembly upon the mountain,
        if not I? 
     Who telleth the ages of the moon, if not I? 
     Who showeth the place where the sun goes to rest?

They went forward to Tara, and summoned the kings of the Danaan Gods to give up the island to them; who asked three days to consider whether they would give battle, or surrender, or quit Ireland.  On that request Amargin gave judgment:  that it would be wrong for the Milesians to take the Gods unprepared that way; and that they should go to their ships again, and sail out the distance of nine waves from the shore, and then return; then if they could conquer Ireland fairly in battle, it should be theirs.

So they embarked, and put the nine waves between themselves and the shore, and waited.  And the Danaans raised up a druid mist and a storm against them, whereby Ireland seemed to them no more than the size of a pig’s back in the water; and by reason of that it has the name of Innis na Wic, the Island of the Pig.  But if the Gods had magic, Amargin had better magic; and he sang that Invocation to the Land of Ireland; and at that the storm fell and the mist vanished.  Then Eber Donn was exulting in his rage at the thought of putting the inhabitants to death; but the thought in his mind brought the storm again, and his ship went down, and he was drowned.  But at last the remnant of them landed, and fought a battle with the Gods, and defeated them; whereafter the Gods put a druid invisibility on themselves, and retired into the hills; and there in their fairy palaces they remain to this day; indeed they do.  They went back into the inwardness of things; whence, however, they were always appearing, and again vanishing into it; and all the old literature of Ireland is thridded through with the lights of their magic and their beauty, and their strange forthcomings and withdrawings.  For example: 

There was Midir the Proud, one of them.  In the time of the great Caesar, Eochaid Airem was high king of Ireland; and he had for his queen Etain, reborn then as a mortal,—­but a Danaan princess at one time, and the wife of Miidir.  It was a fine evening in the summer, and Eochaid Airem was looking from the walls of Tara and admiring the beauty of the world.  He saw an unknown warrior riding towards him; clad in purple tunic; his hair yellow as gold, and his blue eyes shining like candles.  A five-pointed lance was in his hand; his shield was ornamented with beads of gold.