The Tribe that the wilderness can be home, and that the 

 of the wailing of repentant souls may be no more 

 than angry vituperations against the hoodie- 

 crow or laughing-gull or other marauders after 

 lapwing-eggs. Is the weep not a spirit of the 

 waste that was once human, but lost his soul, 

 and so can never reach heaven nor yet dwell 

 on earth, but must night and day be restless 

 as the sea, and wail the long hours away from 

 grey dawn to moonrise, from darkness to the 

 paling of the stars ? So they say, they who 

 know : and who know with the unshakable 

 surety of the unlettered peasant? In the 

 Gaelic imagination the lapwing is something 

 stranger and wilder still : a bird of the ancient 

 world, of the dispossessed gods, nameless in 

 truth because in truth a god nameless and 

 homeless. The Gaelic poet hears in its lament 

 the lamentation of what is gone never to come 

 again, of what long since went away upon the 

 wind, of what is going away on the wind : and 

 he has called the weep the Birds of the 

 Sorrowful Past. Is not the lapwing the 

 bird of Dalua, that unknown mysterious god, 

 that terrible Shadow who is the invisible, 

 inaudible, secret, and dread divinity of weari- 

 ness, separation, gloom, sadness, decay, desola- 

 tion, madness, despair ? 



It is not only in our own land that the 

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