Читать книгу Кельтские сумерки. Уровень 1 / The Celtic Twilight - Уильям Батлер Йейтс - Страница 6

Long ago in stories, men were taken away to assist the gods in a battle. Cuchullan[25] helped the goddess Fand’s[26] to defeat another nation and gained her favor. I’ve also heard that the fairies folk can’t even play their game called hurley[27] unless they have a mortal on each team. Without the help of mortals, the fairies folk are weak and cannot even hit the balls. One day, me and my friend were walking on some marshy[28] land in Galway when we saw an old, tough-looking man digging a ditch. My friend had heard that this man had seen something amazing. And eventually we get this story from him. When he was a young boy, he was working with around thirty other men, women, and boys. They were near Tuam[29], not too far from Knock-na-gur. Suddenly, they all saw about one hundred and fifty fairies folk from a distance of around half a mile. There were two of them, he said, in dark clothes like people of our own time, who stood about a hundred yards from one another. The others wore colorful clothes.

He could not see what they were doing, but it seemed like they have been playing hurley. Sometimes they would disappear, and then they came back out of the bodies of the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the size of living men, but the others were small. He saw them for about half-an-hour, and then the old man he was working for said, “Get on, get on, or we will have no work done!” I asked if he saw the fairies too, “Oh, yes, but he did not want work he was paying wages for to be neglected[30].” He made everybody work so hard that nobody saw what happened to the fairies.

1902.