Story: An Extraordinary Sight

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1

Fifty years ago the island of Inishmore was not overrun by tourists, as it is today, even in mid-summer during periods of perfect weather. You could see some visitors, it is true, wandering along the dusty, bumpy, crooked road that went from one end of the island to the other. You could see them buying Aran sweaters (actually made in Galway) in one of the two general stores at the harbor or clopping along in a jaunting cart hired from a big, dark, surly and silent islander for the quick trip up and down the road. But that was only during the day, while the boat from the mainland went to the other two islands to unload and load supplies, before returning to Inishmore to load up for the return trip to the mainland. Almost no one in those days stayed over from one boat trip to the next, three or four days later. Even fewer stayed for the four weekdays than remained over the three-day interval at the weekend. And the few who did all lodged in the smart and neat cottages offering “Bed and Breakfast” in the harbor area where the boat docked.

That made the two aging schoolteachers quite unusual.

Muriel R. Perkins was from Cedar Falls, where she had taught third grade in a small private school for twenty years. She often traveled in the summer and had visited Europe four times before. Although she did not yet know it, this was to be her last trip,. She’d had no particular reason for going to Ireland but she wanted to, and when another teacher at her school (whom she did not like) scoffed at the idea, that had cinched it.

Her companion was named Pétille. Miss Perkins was pleasantly surprised to find herself and Mme. Pétille on a first-name basis from early in their acquaintance. She had always been taught that the French were very formal and distant. Her own experience on a previous trip in Lille, Dijon, and Paris had in fact re-enforced this notion. But Magali was exceptional. At least, Muriel felt, she was not required to attempt the familiar verb and pronoun forms when they spoke in French. She kept herself alert for this eventuality — which, she knew, would be very significant — but most of the time Magali seemed to prefer English. She had been widowed during the first German advance in the winter of 1940 but, being a vigorous and healthy woman, after her three children had grown up and married she had engaged herself as a volunteer assistant at a school for young girls run by Dominican nuns down the street from her flat in Paris.

She too often traveled during the summer, usually with one of her daughters. She had visited Dublin several times in this way, but that year marked her first extended tour of the rest of the country. Unlike Muriel, after the visit to Inishmore, her life remained outwardly unchanged.

These two older ladies were unusual in all respects, in the islanders’ eyes. They had not hired a jaunting cart, preferring to carry themselves, their small cases and overnight bags slowly along the sunny road. Muriel in fact would have been willing to reverse this frugal decision after the first five minutes, but she didn’t like at all the way the drivers who pestered them at every stopping place seemed to think it their natural right to pick up all tourists, for pay. Yes, Magali was justified in feeling offended at this.

Second, they did not stay in the thickest part of the islands’ tiny population near the dock but made their way farther and farther toward the western end of the island, stopping at last at Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s somewhat isolated farmhouse. Muriel was reluctant to knock at the door there, but once again Magali had proven to know what to do. Even though there was no sign at Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s saying “Bed and Breakfast” — no sign of any kind, in fact — it did seem to be such a place after all.

And then, of course, they had come to stay for a week.

2

That first afternoon had seemed interminable. They had not understood why Mrs. Fitzpatrick had treated them so coldly when they apologized for interrupting what looked like it might have been the family meal; and then when they returned down the stairs to go out again, speaking in French and laughing at some triviality, they again failed to understand the good woman’s cutting anger. She thought they were talking about her in that barbarous, foreign tongue and were laughing at her. Magali appeared not to understand, even after Mrs. Fitzpatrick had directly accused her of this. Muriel, genuinely disturbed by her fantastic, proud fearfulness, tried to mollify the poor woman. She assured her they were most comfortable in their snug room on the highest floor, with the slanted roof-ceiling; she praised the Irish people for their neatness and sense of propriety. But all to no avail. Mrs. Fitzpatrick told them at what time dinner would be served. Mme. Pétille revived from stony silence to say, as Miss Perkins was about to, that they would eat elsewhere. Mrs. Fitzpatrick was not pleased.

They walked farther down the road then, toward the western tip of the island. The road ended in a small cluster of buildings, at least one or two of which had apparently been constructed within the past ten years, unlike the others. One of these was a cinderblock schoolhouse. But there were no restaurants among the buildings, no stores, no commercial buildings of any sort. Of course, there was a church. But most were just houses. In front of one, three boys were kicking about a half-deflated soccer ball. Mme. Pétille did not remark the absence of place to eat or buy food. Muriel was beginning to think Mrs. Fitzpatrick had been so agitated not merely from hurt pride and disappointed avarice so much as from knowledge denied the two outsiders. If one did not take his meals “at home” on the island, perhaps he wasn’t to eat at all! They had not had lunch, neither being very hungry after the bumpy, rolling boat ride …

Muriel pulled herself up inside. She mustn’t give in to this sort of worrying. The beautiful sunshine and the deep blue of the water they would frequently see ahead and to both sides of them as they strolled, the paler azure of the cloud-free sky — these circumstances around her helped relieve the nervousness she was prey to inside. She gave in to their languorous appeal. The warmth of the sun, the freedom of the solitude: it was enough.

Just before the end of the road, a pathway turned off to the left, heading upwards along the only truly steep promontory on the island. Similar paths had crisscrossed their way so far, but this one was marked (which in the general barrenness all around was quite enough to call attention to it). It was merely an arrow pointing up the path.

Other tourists were about, it should be remembered, the boat not being due to return for at least two hours more. The only people visible, it seemed, besides the jaunting car drivers and those three boys down the way, were silly, chattering, camera-carrying women hurrying toward the two older ladies down the pathway.

“I beg pardon,” Magali said most graciously to the two fat ladies in bright cotton dresses who had been speaking English, and asked to where the path led.

Brandishing what certainly looked like a guidebook, one of them replied in a surprised tone —“Why, Dun Aengus!”

This was, in fact, as the English lady’s tone implied, the one true tourist site on the Aran Islands. The day-tourists were evidently beginning to wander away from it now, moving gradually back toward the harbor, but Muriel and Magali climbed on, against the current, toward the top. The others were naturally concerned even then not miss their boat, not to be isolated there in the mouth of Galway Bay. You couldn’t see the shore on any side, even on such a clear day. But for Muriel and Magali, time had already begun to lose its meaning as they strolled up the winding path toward the ancient fortress.

Up to this point, the two ladies had always been surrounded by crowds. In Dublin they had found themselves each morning having breakfast at the same long table, at about the same hour, in the otherwise deserted dining hall of the university dormitory where each had managed to find inexpensive accommodation. Mme. Pétille was in fact enrolled in a summer English course at the university, which she had heard about from one of the nuns at her school. Miss Perkins never spoke to anyone at the breakfast table, and no one addressed her either. At the end of her week she went by bus up through what they called the Yeats country around Sligo and back down through the Connemara to Galway, spending two days and two nights on her tour.

When they saw each other on the ferry deck that Monday morning, amid the cluster of English and Swedish tourists, although they had not spoken to each other before, the two women hailed each other like the best of friends and as if the meeting had been carefully pre-arranged. Mme. Pétille especially, Muriel observed, had seemed to regard the fortuitous recontre as quite natural and commonplace.

“May I ask, please, how was your trip from Dublin?” were her first words.

Miss Perkins had replied, rather astonished at how ordinary the event should seem to herself as well, by pronouncing her name and apologizing for not knowing her companion’s. By shortly after their arrival at Inishmore three hours later, the chance acquaintances had discovered still another coincidence, their mutual plan to spend a full week on the fascinating islands. Before reaching Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s, the French woman had rather solemnly asked Muriel’s “pre-name” and had declared, equally gravely, her own.

But these were all preliminaries. As, two by two, the other curiosity-seekers wandered away back down the grassy, bumpy path toward the road, the harbor, the boat — leaving the bizarre brown-rock walls, the smooth stone floor, and the dizzy precipice with no protecting rail where one half of the prehistoric fortress had obviously fallen into the black sea and foaming, crashing waves four-or five-hundred feet below — as the others straggled away, leaving the American and the French woman there in the quiet breeze and the slowly reddening rays of the late afternoon sun, Muriel and Magali, although again they did not speak, felt themselves quite alone there in that peaceful and beautiful, and yet altogether alien world.

This impression, they were to discover, was mistaken.

3

They saw the girl twice. At least, Miss Perkins did. For the rest of her life she would wonder if her French companion had truly failed to witness the curious, tragic scene that was to haunt her until she died.

After the first evening, when they had managed after all to find a cottage near the dock prepared to serve them supper, the two ladies slipped effortlessly into what, for visitors like themselves, seemed the natural rhythm of life on Inishmore. After a splendid breakfast they would wander each day in one direction or another down the road until they crossed a path they hadn’t explored that struck their fancy. They usually carried a box of crackers or cookies and perhaps a little cheese for a light lunch. They had found a little, yellow-stucco store not far from Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s on the way into town. They would usually carry with them too a book to read and paper and pen with which to write letters.

Muriel did not usually read or write, however, being quite content just to sit on a rock somewhere, feeling the warmth of the sunshine and the pleasantness of the sea breeze, and to gaze silently and steadily at the life around her. Magali too was quiet much of the time.

The remarkable thing about the island, as they discovered, was its utter infertility. The natural land itself seems to be entirely rock, the same grey granite one sees here and there on the mainland but here underlying everything, every footstep, every cottage, every shadow, every wall. Where grass and wild-flowers did grow, the soil was curiously granular and dark. Magali had read in a pamphlet she’d brought from the mainland Tourist Board that for centuries the islanders had heaped seaweed onto the sterile rocks, until the decayed mass of it would support the grass needed to feed sheep.

Even after those centuries, the old women remarked, many tiny, walled-off fields remained quite barren. In one, on the northern side of the island not far from Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s farmhouse, a poor scrawny cow was tethered each day. Stark and lonely, it presented a dark, unmoving shape cut out of the broken stones shining in the sun. In their entire stay on the island, they saw about six sheep.

Wherever they turned off the road, it seemed, Magali and Muriel found an arresting image to contemplate, like the old cow. Perhaps that is why Muriel was content most often to simply gaze about her those sunny, extraordinary days.

The southern side of Inishmore, at least toward the western end, is quite unredeemed from the wild ocean and the ungiving rock. The slowly rolling hills and knolls of the island’s other flank suddenly fall off there, as at Dun Aengus the land has fallen spectacularly into the sea. Lower along the island’s shore, a huge shelf of rough, flat rock extends out over the water. Magali was fond of exploring this curious formation, with its shell-like, pocked surface, but Muriel found it somewhat unsettling. The water, she thought, must run all the way back under this wide table of stone to the habitable land higher up. The tiny pools they came across here and there in the rough surface had brightly colored, living things in them, which suggested that at some times during the year (or perhaps in the night, Muriel thought) the rocky shelf was reclaimed by the waves they saw below its outer edge.

One evening, the two old companions were sitting on a grassy hill above this rough, jutting table of rock. Magali had been reading, her back to the sea so that the light would fall properly over her left shoulder. Muriel had been patiently watching a giant black spider suspended in a large glistening web thrown over the rocks in one of the low walls that crisscrossed the whole island. It was amazing to her that she could observe this small beast for hours without disturbing him, frightening him, or making him “self-conscious.”

Muriel had not been afraid of him either, despite feeling strongly his other-worldly nature. She had begun to be less afraid also that she would be forced to witness some horrible capture and a silent killing in that delicate, shimmery web.

“Ah---“ Magali had said then. In the quiet they’d grown accustomed to, her little gasp seemed to express more than mild surprise. She had turned around and was now shading her eyes.

On a rocky shelf below them was a young woman.

4

The hill they were seated on overlooked one of the most remarkable sections of the strange, flat rock. The structure there extended out from the grassy hill’s edge perhaps two hundred yards. In the precise center of this area, it seemed, the heavy and hard stone had somehow fallen through, back into the water underneath, severing itself from the main mass of rock along straight lines in a perfectly geometrical pattern, a square. Deep inside, as many as fifty feet below the crusty surface, the dark and murky waters rise and fall gently with the motion of the outer waves. Delicate, amorphous, white spots spread over tiny, scattered parts of the pool, just under the waters’ surface, like intricate stains: they were jellyfish.
On the far edge of this strange pool, a tall young woman or a girl stood, her back to the land, staring out toward the sun and the wide ocean. From the distance, she seemed almost teetering on the edge of the low, slowly undulating pool. They were too far away to cry out to her.

Muriel did jump to her feet, shading now her eyes too from the slanting rays from the West. Magali said nothing more.

The girl was dressed in dark clothes, seeming black against the grey-brown of the shell-like rock. Her hair was long and blew gently over her shoulder in the ocean wind. She seemed to have a knit shawl about her, holding it with folded arms, standing quite still. Her skirt was unusually long as well.

Her two observers later admitted to one another that each had felt instinctively at that first moment that she was not a regular inhabitant of the island. They had asked discreetly at the little yellow store the following day and felt their notion confirmed by the evasive answer received. She was an outsider, a visitor, they had both felt at once, like themselves.

Muriel stood quietly on their hillside, waiting for the young woman to turn and notice them. She did not. She might as well have been alone.

Her clothes and perhaps something of her attitude, Muriel said to herself, seemed old fashioned. Something a girl in Muriel’s day might have worn.

“She is—“ Magali said quietly then, from her rock: “She is — handsome.”

And the other old gazer could only agree. The girl below had turned her head toward the rising cliff to her right, raising her arm to shade her eyes. A corner of her shawl lifted gently off her shoulder and blew back to one side. This too had a charm for the two spectators on the hill, rising as it did so gracefully in the breeze.

Hair brushed back over the forehead, wind caressing the soft cheek. The sound, distant and calm: rustling in the ears, whispering, the waters rocking below. The waves rolling slowly, black with depth, etched by bright light and sparkling white foam into somehow moving, glistening, sculptured black crystal. The damp cool breeze on the face, the warm sunshine slowly penetrating deeply into the body. The caressing, loving, cherishing silence rustling at her skirts …

The young woman began to move to the right, around the corner of the treacherous pool, making her way back toward the living portion of the island to one side of the old ladies. By the time they had reached the pathway she must have taken from the edge of the rocky shelf onto the green slope, by then the lovely poised creature had disappeared.

“She is admirable,” Muriel said to her friend on their way back to Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s. “We must try to find her again.” But the French women by this time appeared to have her own thoughts on the subject and did not reply.

Muriel’s excessive response to even this first view of the dark young woman should perhaps have been recognized as a preliminary warning of the slight disorder that was to strike her later, forcing her to decide to leave the island after only four days. Magali said she was bored by then too.

Their next day was cloudy and cool. It was not stormy, and the two older ladies were not absolutely prevented from going out. Perhaps it was the exertions of the previous days, then, that most encouraged them to stay close to the road, never wandering far from Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s.

Muriel took it upon herself to ask in the little store just down the road if the old proprietor knew a tall young woman who might live on the island. He may have heard her question imperfectly, or even slightly misunderstood her English, being accustomed to Gaelic most of the day. He replied that there were still some children on Inishmore, but “no young people.”

“They go off now, d’ya see?” he said; meaning, Muriel thought, that they went to the mainland, leaving only young children and old people. Muriel’s own observation tended to confirm this remark.

Muriel did not mention the young woman again to Magali, but she found her thoughts often returning to the image they had both had of her the afternoon before. Muriel recognized in herself a certain quiet envy of the other’s proud bearing, her independence, self-sufficiency, and strength. It did not occur to her that the same traits could be observed in Mme. Pétille, her friend. She did recognize, of course, that these were qualities of the particular scene she had witnessed, more perhaps than of the girl herself.

Seeing her and, especially, having these unjustified impressions of her character were among the many out-of-the-way experiences of Muriel’s island visit. The rude denial of these fantasies that she was later to register left her deeply troubled.

When she and her companion on that cloudy day went for tea to the cottage they now knew in the harbor area, Miss Perkins asked the lady in charge if she knew of a lovely young girl among the few tourists at present staying on. “No, no,” she was told; “No one like that, dear… And how are ya’ finding Missus Fitzpatrick’s now?”

5

The next day the sturdy Mme. Pétille and her little American friend seemed thoroughly restored. The weather had changed again for the better, as their hostess had predicted at supper the evening before, remaining cool but becoming once again sunny and peaceful.

Magali began to tell Muriel about her family as they explored for the first time the eastern end of the island. Muriel was interested, feeling her old self again, and even chimed in a few remarks about her sisters and their families in Illinois and Michigan. They spent most of the day chatting here and there among the small, flat fields, in the tiny pathways between the piled rock walls. They met an old man on one of the roads, the first islander they had seen not on the main road or in a house. He didn’t say anything, staring rather stupidly, they felt, at them; but when they wished him good morning he nodded happily and pulled his lips back into a broad smile away from the one stubby brown tooth sticking down from his front gum.

The little old touring ladies had to smile at each other surreptitiously after they had passed this pitiful creature. But mostly, they had just talked that day.

After tea once more in the harbor cottage, they struck upon the idea of returning to Dun Aengus. Looking back on it in later years, Miss Perkins was to feel this decision quite natural or even inevitable. She had been feeling slightly tired, physically, but not at all ready to go in for the day. She was also feeling quite pleased by the new closeness a whole day of friendly conversation had established between herself and Magali. Looking back, later, she did wonder that this intimacy could so quickly disappear. Perhaps it was the return of ordinary time upon them when they left Inishmore the next afternoon. They had planned to write each other, perhaps with a view to future visits and vacations. But that was not to be. Muriel realized that this was her fault, not due to any coolness from the redoubtable Mme. Pétille.

6

They thought the sunset viewed from the height of the bizarre and ancient structure must be magnificent. It would be just beginning before they would have to start back to their guesthouse for supper. They did not defy Mrs. Fitzpatrick anymore on such matters of custom.

So they positively hurried off up the road to the West. If a jaunting car had hailed them then, Muriel thought gaily, they might even have taken it.

They rested twice along the road, once before a tiny grey beach where a strange, curved, open black boat had been lying on its side since they arrived, and once at the tiny sign pointing off the road to the upward footpath. Both women were winded. Muriel was also feeling rather hot by this time, and found her vision slightly dazzled when she looked at anything directly in the sun. But both old women seemed eager for the sight that awaited them. After only a moment seated awkwardly on a rock there, Magali and her old friend started off again.

That pathway is not like the others that go between the tiny fields. They are dusty, flat, and rather smooth; whereas the path to Dun Aengus is grassy, rather steep, and studded with small points of rock jutting up from beneath the soil. Magali was the stronger of the two old ladies and had less difficulty than Muriel. At first she paused now and then to look back towards the northern side of the island they had come from, once remarking how the afternoon sun made everything on that side seem to glow warmly. Muriel became self-conscious about how she was slowing her companion down. She did not turn to look back.

Mme. Pétille finally went on ahead, at her own rate. Muriel did not mind this desertion and was in fact enjoying her climb at the slower pace. When she reached the top, she found Magali plunged again into one of her silent reveries, standing with her back to the old fort, several yards from the footpath, looking out over the clustered buildings, that small beach and Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s farmhouse, across the grey waters of the bay, toward the mainland.

That curious nervous disorder by this time had begun to take possession of Miss Perkin’s little body, although she did not realize it then. She was out of breath and quite dizzy from the brisk walk and the steep climb. She felt hot.

The stones at that side of Dun Aengus are small and pointed, not for sitting. Muriel made her way, calming her breathing and trying to re-focus her disturbed vision, into the wide semi-circle of rocks. She could at least sit there a moment on the smooth stone floor.

In fact, she gladly plumped herself down on the first stone she found. It was at the entranceway itself to the dark old fort, or was it an ancient temple? She closed her eyes. Gradually, her heart-beat slowed to its normal pace. Slowly, her rapid breathing and feeling of heat subsided. The unusual calm that she had felt before on the island stole back over her in the utter silence of that extraordinary place. Magali had retreated from her consciousness. She felt alone, and she felt free.

She was not in truth entirely alone, however, and when she realized this upon opening her eyes, she almost gasped in surprise. She became conscious then of the silence there, feeling that, even if she were to try, she could make no sound.

Looking back later, it was always the silence and the sensation, oddly, of being alone that returned to her.

The dark young woman they had seen on the shelf-like rock was, of course, with her then. She was dressed just the same, with the same dark shawl lifting gently from her shoulder in the ocean breeze. Muriel could not speak to her or call out, even to Mme. Pétille, for fear of startling her. There, where the dark rock walls and the smooth stone floor had plummeted centuries before down hundreds of feet into the deep, black waters, the young woman was seated. Her feet in fact must have been dangling over the edge!

Muriel hardly dared to breathe, so disorienting was this prospect to her. With no guard-rail whatsoever, the precipice had fascinated her that first day but had terrified her as well. One of those images she’d carried away with her was the quick view she had allowed herself over the edge, of the utterly black water perhaps five hundred feet below, glistening in the sunlight like carved ebony and the dazzling, sparkling foam of the waves crashing into what might have been the old fort’s rubble, the broken rocks. They were so far below that even the roar of the waves could not be heard at the top. There, all was still.

The quiet calm, the warm emptiness.

The sun’s warmth and the gentle wind …

It did not seem unthinkable to Muriel that the younger woman would be perched thus on the brink of the high cliff. She herself after all had inched her way to the edge, and Magali had done so as well. Once again, however, she was moved by the apparent calm and self-possession of this other, lovely creature. She was seated at the edge of a dizzying height, looking — it seemed — impassively into the sky and the darkening sea.

As Muriel watched her from behind, just after the older lady had opened her eyes again still rather disoriented by the slanting light and by her fatigue, the young woman still gracefully and calmly leaned slowly forward into the void and, without the slightest sound, vanished from sight.

7

Muriel Perkins was horrified, of course. She was shaken to her soul. Jumping to her feet she turned to find Magali, but Mme. Pétille was now shading her eyes looking the other way, over the bay. Hearing movement behind her, the French woman said then, “Look!” gesturing down toward the shore.

The black, open boat they had seen on its side for days was then bumping out into the waters. From the distance the men at the oars seemed mere extensions of its own dark, hulking shape, indistinguishable from it.
Muriel stepped back into Don Aengus, looking toward the side opening out to the West, into the sunset. There was nothing but light and emptiness.

8

The next day they heard no talk of a missing person. The young woman’s body seemed to have disappeared forever, sucked away in the boiling currents. She seemed to have left no trace, except in Muriel’s mind.
Muriel said nothing.

When they told Mrs. Fitzpatrick that morning that they had suddenly decided to return on the boat of that day, abruptly cutting short their often announced plan to stay a full week, that good woman was not even surprised.

By that time, the two foreign visitors she had entertained in her home had become for her utterly inscrutable.

***