黄面志(第七卷)

　　《Literature系列：黄面志（第7卷）》：　　A PALLID and starved sunlight looked upon the shore-land, and mocked it, because, now, in the fall of the harvest, there was no yield of any kind for the blade, or any reaper to seek it.On all the four fair ploughlands of the lords of Dunbeekin, stretch-ing along the smooth valley of the bay, and pushing inward over gently lifting slopes to the furze-lined granite barrier of Gabriel, no ditch stood unbroken : the fields lay naked and blackened by fire. The tall keep watched the deserted water with sightless eyes, through which the daylight shone from wall across to wall, and at its feet the crouching huts of its people were thatchless. It was the desolation of conquest. The conquered were dead, or in hiding among the hills. The spoilers, their havoc wrought, had turned and gone away, with famine spreading wave-like at their heels.　　Far up on the flank of the mountain there fell the distant lowing boom of a bittern. Some cattle, lost in the waste of thicket at a further height, answered this call as if it came from their kind.　　Three men, sprawled on their bellies in a grassy crevice between the boulders, had been peering downward upon the picture of ruin below. They glanced at one another now, with a flash of comprehension. A little wiser than their kine, they knew that the bittern cried only in the breeding spring-time: and this was the tenth month of the year. One of them echoed the sound, and when it was repeated, coming nearer, the three dragged them-selves to their feet, andi, stealing upward, stood forth on a ledge of rock in plain view. There cjimbed towards them presently another, a lean and agile man, whose bare legs brushed through the spikes of furze and heather as if they were cased in hide, and whose naked soles missed no footing on the stones as he bounded from boulder to crag.　　He stood panting before them, and without speech turned to survey the prospect spread beneatb, till his breath could be overtaken. Laoking thus, his rover eye caught something the others had already seen-a small barque, with full sails limply hanging on the still air, down in the misty distance where the great sea ends and Dunmanus begins. He pointed to it, and nodded his head.　　"It is to Turlogh, son of Fineen, I will be hastening now," he said, with abruptness. "how me the way."　　As the group turned, the foremost of them lifted his head and halted.　　"It is Turlogh who comes to you," he said.　　A few paces away, on the crown of the cliff, stood a man to whom all four bent their heads. He regarded them with an eye which asked them questions, yet shrank from hearing these if they were to be not to his mind, and they, knowing this well, beld their peace, and looked about them at their ease.　　The Lord of Dunbeekin was an old man now7 tall and slender of frame, with much grey hair flowing upon his rounded shoulders.　　……