Read Dublin for Free Online

the island forever. That was long ago now. Nobody was sure exactly how long. There had been great battles, that was certain.
      And then the Tuatha De Danaan had withdrawn from the land of the living and gone underground. They were living there still, under the hills, under lakes, or far away across the sea in the fabled Western Isles, feasting in their glittering halls. That was the story.
      But Goibniu doubted. He could see that the mounds were manmade; indeed, their construction might not be very different from the earth and stoneworks which men built now.
      But if it was said that the Tuatha De Danaan had retreated under them, then they probably dated from that former age. So had the Tuatha De Danaan built them? Likely enough, he supposed.
      Divine race or not, he judged, they had still been men. Yet if this were correct, here was the curious thing: whenever he inspected the carved stones at these old sites, he always observed that the patterns of the carvings were similar to those on the metalwork of his own day. He'd seen pieces of fine worked gold, too, which had been found in bogs and other places, and which he guessed were very old. On these, also, the designs were familiar. Goibniu was an expert in these matters. Did the incoming tribes really copy the designs left by the departed race of the goddess Danu? Wasn't it more likely that some of the former people had remained and transmitted their skills?
      Anyway, did an entire people, divine or not, really vanish under the hills?
      Goibniu cast his cold eye on the sid. There was one stone there that always caught his attention whenever he passed by. It was a large one, a big slab about six feet across, in front of what had once been the entrance. He went over to it now.
      What a curious thing it was. The swirling lines with which it was incised made several patterns, but the most significant was the great trefoil of spirals on the left face. As he had so many times before, he ran his hands over the stone, whose sandlike roughness felt pleasantly cool in the warm sun as his fingers traced the grooves. The biggest spiral was a double one, like a pair of eels coiled tightly together with their heads locking in the middle. Follow one of the coils outwards and it led to the second spiral, another double one below it. The third, smaller spiral, a single one, rested tangentially on the swirling shoulders of the other two.
      And from their outer edges the grooves gathered in the angles where the spirals met, like tidemarks at an inlet, before flowing on in swirling rivers round the stone.
      What did they mean? What was the significance of the trefoil? Three spirals, connected yet independent, always leading inward, yet also flowing out into an endless nothingness. were they the symbols of the sun and moon and the earth below? Or the three sacred rivers of a half-forgotten world?
      He had seen a crazy fellow make a design like that once. It was just at this season of the year, before the harvest, when the last of the old grain goes mouldy, and poor folk who eat it act strangely and dream dreams. He'd come upon him by the seashore, sitting alone, big and bare-boned, his eyes fixed upon nothing, a tattered stick in his hand, tracing spirals just like these in the empty sand. Was he mad, or was he wise? Goibniu shrugged. Who knew?
      It was all one and the same.
      Still tracing the swirling grooves in the morning silence, his hand moved to and fro. One thing was certain.
      Whoever made those spirals, Tuatha De Danaan or not, Goibniu felt he knew him as only a fellow craftsman can. Other men might find the sid grim and fearsome, but he did not care.
      He liked the cosmic spirals on the stone- cold earth.
      And then it had come to him. It was a strange sensation.
      Nothing you could put a name to. An echo in the mind.
      The season of Lughnasa was approaching. There would be a number of great festivals on the island, and though he had