No More Learning

Still eastward he went, what is now Bulben on one side, Cope's mountain
on the other, until at last he threw himself at full length in a deep
cavern and slept. Henceforward he made this cavern his lair, issuing
forth to hunt the deer or the bears or the mountain oxen. Slowly the
years went by, his fits of fury growing more and more frequent, though
there was no one but his own shadow to rave against. When his fury was
on him even the bats and owls, and the brown frogs that crept out of
the grass at twilight, would hide themselves--even the bats and owls
and the brown frogs. These he had made his friends, and let them crawl
and perch about him, for at times he would be very gentle, and they
too were sullen and silent--the outcasts from they knew not what. But
most of all, things placid and beautiful feared him. He would watch for
hours, hidden in the leaves, to reach his hand out slowly and carefully
at last, and seize and crush some glittering halcyon.

Slowly the years went by and human face he never saw, but sometimes,
when the gentle mood was on him and it was twilight, a presence seemed
to float invisibly by him and sigh softly, and once or twice he awoke
from sleep with the sensation of a finger having rested for a moment
on his forehead, and would mutter a prayer to the moon that glimmered
through the door of his cave before turning to sleep again. 'O moon,'
he would say, 'that wanderest in the blue cave of the sky, more white
than the beard of Partholan, whose years were five hundred, sullen and
solitary, sleeping only on the floor of the sea: keep me from the evil
spirits of the islands of the lake southward beyond the mountains, and
the evil spirits of the caves northward beyond the mountains, and the
evil spirits who wave their torches by the mouth of the river eastward
beyond the valley, and the evil spirits of the pools westward beyond
the mountains, and I will offer you a bear and a deer in full horn, O
solitary of the cave divine, and if any have done you wrong I will
avenge you. '

Gradually, however, he began to long for this mysterious touch.

At times he would make journeys into distant parts, and once the
mountain bulls gathered together, proud of their overwhelming numbers
and their white horns, and followed him with great bellowing westward,
he being laden with their tallest, well-nigh to his cave, and would
have gored him, but, pacing into a pool of the sea to his shoulders, he
saw them thunder away, losing him in the darkness. The place where he
stood is called Pooldhoya to this day.

So the years went slowly by, and ever deeper and deeper came his
moodiness, and more often his fits of wrath. Once in his gloom he paced
the forests for miles, now this way, now that, until, returning in the
twilight, he found himself standing on a cliff southward of the lake
that was southward of the mountains. The moon was rising.
The sound
of the swaying of reeds floated from beneath, and the twittering of
the flocks of reed-wrens who love to cling on the moving stems. It was
the hour of votaries. He turned to the moon, then hurriedly gathered
a pile of leaves and branches, and making a fire cast thereon wild
strawberries and the fruit of the quicken-tree. As the smoke floated
upwards a bar of faint purple clouds drifted over the moon's face--a
refusal of the sacrifice. Hurrying through the surrounding woods he
found an owl sleeping in the hollow of a tree, and returning cast him
on the fire. Still the clouds gathered. Again he searched the woods.
This time it was a badger that he cast among the flames. Time after
time he came and went, sometimes returning immediately with some live
thing, at others not till the fire had almost burnt itself out. Deer,
wild swine, birds, all to no purpose. Higher and higher he piled the
burning branches, the flames and the smoke waved and circled like
the lash of a giant's whip. Gradually the nearer islands passed the
rosy colour on to their more distant brethren. The reed-wrens of the
furthest reed beds disturbed amid their sleep must have wondered at the
red gleam reflected in each other's eyes. Useless his night-long toil;
the clouds covered the moon's face more and more, until, when the long
fire-lash was at its brightest, they drowned her completely in a surge
of unbroken mist. Raging against the fire he scattered with his staff
the burning branches, and trampled in his fury the sacrificial embers
beneath his feet. Suddenly a voice in the surrounding darkness called
him softly by name.