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Gradually these warm forces loosened the ice's awful grip. Its edges frayed by an inch at a time–and then by a yard–and then by a mile. Soon, like the pink-brown skin in the healing of a wound, the native earth of Ireland began to appear again.
I've described to you how the ice had ripped into the terrain on its advance. Well, it did so too on its retreat. Large melting slabs of ice gouged out caves and fjords and chasms. The ancient stone foundations of our land shook, undermined by the desperate, slipping ice. Rocky glens opened again as their walls crumbled. The clay began to breathe. Hills and mountains shone in the new sun, and down their slopes poured ribbons of new, silver waters. When you gaze at a mountain from a distance, and you see a shining river that looks like the spoor of a snail, you can be sure that was an Ice Age stream.
That final loosening sent boulders sliding down mountainsides and hurled stones down into valleys, as the ice ripped them away from their rock bodies. These "glacial erratics," as they're called, loiter to this day across the Irish landscape, some of them big as houses. I myself have been glad of their shelter many times. And they lie at the core of the story of Newgrange.
CHAPTER THREE
As though to collect breath, the Storyteller halted. Puffs of steam rose from his wet boots as they dried in the heat of the fire.
In the pause, people stirred. The boy looked anxiously at his mother to check her mood–and she seemed calm. His father took off his spectacles and polished them with a little amber cloth. Without his glasses, his sky-blue eyes sparkled.
The boy pushed down his stockings and rubbed his shins, now hot and mottled from the fire. Nobody moved from where they sat; one or two of the men had taken off their jackets and sat shirtsleeved. Their faces glowed, with pride as much as heat; this epic account gave them the story of their own ancestry, the origins and magnificence of their own country. The women seemed more placid, less intense in their enjoyment–but nonetheless enthralled. Nobody reflected the magic of the hour as much as the children, whose faces glowed like lamps.
As the Storyteller gathered strength for the next installment, he curled one hand around the bowl of his pipe and raised the forefinger of the other hand commandingly. He drew three, four, five, silent puffs on the pipe and took it from his mouth.
This place, Newgrange–how much do you know about it? You might have read in the newspapers of this great and mysterious edifice under the ground in county Meath. It's not far in from the coast, and it's northwest of Dublin by about thirty miles or so. I've been there myself, and it's a mighty place, in rich land on a hill above the river Boyne. The local people know all about it because over the centuries many gentlemen and scholars have examined it, guessing at its history and building a good body of lore. A kind woman who lives on the hillside took me into what she called "our cave." She lit a stub of a candle, and the flame was enough to display great wonders to me.
This marvelous, immortal structure was built five thousand years ago, before Stonehenge in England, before the pyramids of Egypt. Every person in the world should visit it, because it tells us how amazing were the ancestors of man. It's a very inspiring place, and while I was there, I came to consider a great deal about it and the person who built it–and this story entered my mind.
The Architect of Newgrange was a young man, possessed of a tall and thin physique, above which his wild head of tawny hair looked like a tree on fire. His deep-set eyes frightened the children, and his manner took no account of courtesy–which is to say that he treated people abruptly. Until the events occurred that I am about to relate to you, he had spent much of his life in silence, speaking only when spoken to, never offering friendship, and generally avoiding the burden of conviviality. His was the life of the aloof. If we wish to excuse someone for being like that, we say, "Ah, they're shy," and I do believe he was a shy child and grew up a shy young man.
At one stage of his life, this remote and strange individual began to invest a deep interest in the observation of stone–and by stone, I mean those rocks I've just described to you that were cast down the mountains when the ice melted.
To most people, a stone is a stone–nothing more and nothing less than a rock. But this young man grew to love stone the way farmers love cattle, the way women love children, the way boys love pretty girls, the way the waves love the shore. To him, stone seemed to speak; he didn't hear a voice, but he understood it just the same, because deep in his mind a picture formed–of the world as it must have been long, long ago, before there were trees with leaves or animals with fur. Stone brought the past to him and brought him to the past.
Now, this man's people, who commanded the hill of Newgrange–they lived handsomely. Their land of rich, brown clay was left behind ten thousand years ago, a great, wide silt after the ice melted. Like all such terrain in Europe, it was discovered by travelers coming over from the east in search of a fertile living.
In Ireland they found a good and pleasant home. Hazel and rowan trees already covered the plains and grew down the mountainsides and into the valleys. Wide, slow rivers took the voyagers in from the coast on the logs of their simple rafts. And they discovered that if they cleared the trees, they could settle almost anywhere, because the earth was so easy to cultivate.
Hillsides proved the best places. They could live off the fine land and cast an eye over the surrounding countryside for approaching dangers. Newgrange proved ideal–a high hill with good soil overlooking a placid river. People settled there very early, six thousand years before the birth of Christ, and they began to work the earth of the Boyne Valley.
In those far-off days, everyone on such a hillside labored hard. From the age a child could lift or scrabble to the oldest man or woman able to drag or push, they hauled and parted and combed the clay. The soil they tilled was warm and deep and full of different colors–honey or red-gold or mahogany. Scatter seeds there, and something always grew.
And every year they turned the soil, they sowed their seeds, they welcomed the rain, they hailed the sun, and they were happy.
Yet for all their prosperity and for all their good fortune, they made slow progress in life–because they hadn't yet discovered anything better to work with than stone. They depended upon it for their weapons and tools, and they handled it well. In their hands, stone made stone; using stone tools, they hammered out new stone implements–knives and chisels, copied from shards of stone that they found among the occasional little beaches of shale on the banks of the river.
They also established what you might call local factories. These were places to which they hauled the rocks that they found strewn in the countryside. Hacking into such boulders with stone axes and sledgehammers, they cut javelins, arrows, more hammers, and better stone axes.
(continued on the next page)
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