The Mountains of Instead

  [For St. Patrick's Day:] Some thousands of years before this day — no one can say for certain how long before — other warriors and leaders first came from Spain into Ireland. They were people called Gaedhal or Gael because their ancestor in the days of Moses was Gaedhal Glas. When this Gaedhal was a child Moses cured him of the bite of a serpent — and he prophesied, look you, that no serpent or other poisonous thing would infest the green western Island that his far-off posterity would one day inhabit.  The Gael wandered for hundreds of years before they came into Spain, following their leader Mil or Milesius, and after they had long lived there they heard of the beautiful island to the north: the Isle of Destiny, foretold by Moses. Mil’s uncle Ith was first sent to find that land, to return them a report upon it. But the Tuatha De Danann, the great wizard-people of the island, suspecting his purpose, killed Ith. It was the first death of the wars of the Milesians and the ...

  [1816]      Lastly — and as though in a different hand — or written on a different day, or a different mood — is appended this: — ‘Ali — A dark star presided at our meeting — I feel a doom upon me that I cannot limn!  Remember — where there is sin, there may be Forgiveness — if there is Repentance.  It will be my constant prayer for you. —  The child is well and I hasten to tell you of it for I believe you are fonder of it than I am, and fonder of it than you are of me.   — Catherine ’             A carriage, just at that juncture arriving, deposits before Ali the Honourable Mr. Peter Piper, done up in fur-collar and gauntlets, all again prepared as before.  Without words Ali brings him within the house — from which by now the plate, the valuables, the books and most of the moveables have been taken away for sale — and on the last chair before the last table he takes paper, and ...

  [1969] That this City house was one of only three in the world equipped with a complete Patent Cosmo-Opticon or Theatrum Mundi in more-or- less working order, Hawksquill had known before she bought it. It had amused her to think that her house would be capped by such an enormous and iron-bound talisman of her mind’s heavens. She had been prepared, though, neither for its great beauty, nor — when it had been set in motion, and she had adjusted it in certain long-thought- out ways — for its usefulness. She had been unable to learn much about the Cosmo-Opticon’s designer, so she couldn’t tell what he had conceived its function to be — entertainment only, probably — but what he hadn’t known she supplied, and so now when she bent to pass through the tiny door she entered not only a stained-glass- and-wrought-iron Cosmos exquisitely detailed and moving with spanking exactness in its clockwork rounds, but one which presented to Hawksquill the actual moment ...