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To Cuchullain it did not seem that he slept; for though his eyelids fell, his sight still rested on the calm surface of the lake, the shining sand on the shore, and the great brown rock against which he reclined. But whence came the two maidens who were walking toward him along the glistening sand? He gazed at them in speechless wonder; surely only in dreamland could so fair a vision be seen. In dreamland, yes; for a dim memory awoke in his breast that he had seen them before in the world of slumber. One wore a mantle of soft green, and her flaxen hair, strangely white but with a glint of gold, fell about her shoulders so thickly it seemed like a silken hood out of which looked a white face with gleaming violet eyes. The other maiden had dark brown eyes, very large, very luminous; her cheeks were rosy, with just a hint of bronzing by the sunshine, a dimple in her chin added to the effect of her pouting red lips; her dark brown hair was unbound and falling loosely over her deep crimson mantle, which reached from her waist in five heavy folds. The recumbent warrior felt a weird spell upon him. Powerless to move or speak, he saw the two maidens advance and stand beside him, the sunlight gleaming upon their bare arms and bosoms. They smiled upon him and uplifted their arms, and then from their fingers there rained down upon him blinding lightnings, filaments of flame that stung like whipcords, a hail of rainbow sparks that benumbed him, darting flames that pierced him like javelins; and as he gazed upward through that storm of fire, writhing in his agony, he saw still their white arms waving to and from, weaving a network of lightnings about him, their faces smiling upon him, serene and kindly; and in the eyes of her with the crimson mantle he read a tenderness all too human. Eyes that shone with tenderness; white arms that wove a rainbow-mesh of torturing fires about him; his anguish ever increasing, until he saw the arms stop waving, held for an instant aloft, and then swept downward with a torrent of flame and a mighty crash of sound like the spears of ten thousand warriors meeting in battle, and then–he was alone, staring with wide-open eyes at the blue, cloud-mirroring surface of the lakes and the white sand gleaming on the shore.

“Trouble me not with questions,” said Cuchullain to the warriors gathered about him. “My limbs are benumbed and refuse to obey me. Bear me to my sick-bed at Tete Brece.”

“Shall we not take you to Dun Imrish, or to Dun Delca, where you may be with Emer?” said they.

“No,” he replied, a shudder convulsing his strong frame; “bear me to Tete Brece.

And when they had done so, he dwelt there for a year, and on his face was always the look of a slumberer who is dreaming; not once did he smile, nor did he speak one word during that year.

When the soul has many lives
Fettered by Forgetfulness,
Hands that burst its long-worn gyves
Cruel seem and pitiless.
Yet they come all tenderly,
Loved companions of the past;
And the sword that sets us free
Turns our pain to peace at last.

III.

What shadows turn his eyes away
Who fain would scale the heavenly heights;
There shines the beauty of a day,
And there the ancient Light of Lights.

And while he broods on visions dim
And grows forgetful of his fate,
The chariot of the Sun for him
And all the tribal stars await.

The Slumber of Cuchullain, and the Message of Angus