Night over isle and sea rolled her curtain of stars,
Then a trouble awoke in the air, the east was banded with bars;
Dawn as yellow as sulphur leaped on the mountain height;
Dawn, in the deepest glen, fell a wonder of light;
High and clear stood the palms in the eye of the brightening east,
And lo! from the sides of the sea the broken sound of the feast! 
As, when in days of summer, through open windows, the fly
Swift as a breeze and loud as a trump goes by,
But when frosts in the field have pinched the wintering mouse,
Blindly noses and buzzes and hums in the firelit house: 
So the sound of the feast gallantly trampled at night,
So it staggered and drooped, and droned in the morning light.

IV.  THE RAID

It chanced that as Rua sat in the valley of silent falls,
He heard a calling of doves from high on the cliffy walls. 
Fire had fashioned of yore, and time had broken, the rocks;
There were rooting crannies for trees and nesting-places for flocks;
And he saw on the top of the cliffs, looking up from the pit of the shade,
A flicker of wings and sunshine, and trees that swung in the trade. 
“The trees swing in the trade,” quoth Rua, doubtful of words,
“And the sun stares from the sky, but what should trouble the birds?”
Up from the shade he gazed, where high the parapet shone,
And he was aware of a ledge and of things that moved thereon. 
“What manner of things are these?  Are they spirits abroad by day? 
Or the foes of my clan that are come, bringing death by a perilous way?”

The valley was gouged like a vessel, and round like the vessel’s lip,
With a cape of the side of the hill thrust forth like the bows of a ship. 
On the top of the face of the cape a volley of sun struck fair,
And the cape overhung like a chin a gulph of sunless air. 
“Silence, heart!  What is that?—­that, that flickered and shone,
Into the sun for an instant, and in an instant gone? 
Was it a warrior’s plume, a warrior’s girdle of hair? 
Swung in the loop of a rope, is he making a bridge of the air?”

Once and again Rua saw, in the trenchant edge of the sky,
The giddy conjuring done.  And then, in the blink of an eye,
A scream caught in with the breath, a whirling packet of limbs,
A lump that dived in the gulph, more swift than a dolphin swims;
And there was the lump at his feet, and eyes were alive in the lump. 
Sick was the soul of Rua, ambushed close in a clump;
Sick of soul he drew near, making his courage stout;
And he looked in the face of the thing, and the life of the thing went out. 
And he gazed on the tattooed limbs, and, behold, he knew the man: 
Hoka, a chief of the Vais, the truculent foe of his clan: 
Hoka a moment since that stepped in the loop of the rope,
Filled with the lust of war, and alive with courage and hope.