they had spoken some established blasphemies, he had been unable
to understand them merely owing to the preoccupied satisfaction
of his mind.

On that fantastic fringe of the Gaelic land where he walked as a
boy, the cliffs were as fantastic as the clouds. Heaven seemed to
humble itself and come closer to the earth. The common paths of
his little village began to climb quite suddenly and seemed
resolved to go to heaven. The sky seemed to fall down towards the
hills; the hills took hold upon the sky. In the sumptuous sunset
of gold and purple and peacock green cloudlets and islets were
the same. Evan lived like a man walking on a borderland, the
borderland between this world and another. Like so many men and
nations who grow up with nature and the common things, he
understood the supernatural before he understood the natural. He
had looked at dim angels standing knee-deep in the grass before
he had looked at the grass. He knew that Our Lady's robes were
blue before he knew the wild roses round her feet were red. The
deeper his memory plunged into the dark house of childhood the
nearer and nearer he came to the things that cannot be named.
All through his life he thought of the daylight world as a sort
of divine debris, the broken remainder of his first vision. The
skies and mountains were the splendid off-scourings of another
place. The stars were lost jewels of the Queen. Our Lady had
gone and left the stars by accident.

His private tradition was equally wild and unworldly. His
great-grandfather had been cut down at Culloden, certain in his
last instant that God would restore the King. His grandfather,
then a boy of ten, had taken the terrible claymore from the hand