Still, when you get to Connemara or Mayo, you will not grudge these folk the access to a market which makes lobster fishing almost the most profitable of their industries. Along Galway Bay you look out over one of the most beautiful scenes in Ireland, and the most barren. Across, opposite you, is the mountainous shore of Clare, where, in the limestone district called Burren, Ireton (down there on some errand of mercy) reported that there was not water enough to drown a man, soil enough to bury him, nor wood enough to hang him. Off the mouth of the bay, making a natural breakwater for its superb natural harbour, lie the three islands of Aran which are, like Burren, built up of flat limestone slabs--in whose crevices there grows herbage, sweet and nourishing for cattle; but how human beings, let alone cows, travel those rocks without breaking a leg a week in the fissures passes all comprehension.
Rocky though the soil, these waters are not barren, and Aran lives by its nets, and lives much better than it did in the old days before the Congested Districts Board set up the folk with strong boats and good gear, and established a steamer to bring them in touch with the market. Yet Synge's wonderful and terrible little drama, _Riders to the Sea_, tells the true story of their life, shows how encompassed it is at any moment by the deadliest peril; for the waves on that western coast have been seen to break where there was nearly a hundred feet in depth of water, so vast, so tremendous are the movements of storm where the Atlantic swings in its full force upon the first bulwark it meets--a bulwark planted in the deep, and dreadfully sudden therefore in its check to the whole power of ocean.
[Illustration: MWEELREA AND THE KILLARY, FROM TULLY STRAND, RENVYLE]
That is what gives a special character to all the scenery of western Ireland. It is not only sea you are looking at, it is ocean: ocean in its full depth within a few miles of the shore, and the blueness of deep water is a very different thing from the blue of the Irish Channel or the English, to say nothing of the yellowish waters of the North Sea. And the wash of waves there, even on a calm day, has in it a slow, heavy rhythm, a sense of power which rocks and soothes the senses. But to face that sea on that coast, not only rockbound but flanked with a line of reefs and islands, in hooker or pookaun or canvas-covered curragh, is an enterprise that might well dismay. Yet, oddly enough, these men whose daily life is one long risk of drowning, who endanger themselves times innumerable in the mere act of entering or leaving a curragh when a sea runs, are more frightened than women by the unknown adventure of sailing in a strong vessel clear away to sea, and when they first lose sight of land and see only water round them, they will lie down and give themselves over for lost.