poor devils!

To Shane He existed, though how to think of Him was difficult. Why a
man? Why not some strange thing of the air, as a cuttlefish is of the
sea? Something tenuous, of immense brain power, of immense will.
Something cold. But why even that? Why not, as the cabalists had it, a
Figure, arithmetical or geometrical, a Sound.... A Formula of some great
undiscoverable indefinable Thought.... He was cold, He was efficient. He
had so much brains....

It seemed to Shane that this optimism, this despair were strange mental
drugs, going through the mental system as a depressant or a stimulant
would go through the physical, creating illusions ... illusions ... and
the sane man was one who had no illusions, not the meaning a man uses of
the phrase when he has been jilted by a woman or wronged out of money by
a friend, but actually, finitely, no illusions.... He was sane, a few
other men in the world must be sane, but the rest were drugged for their
hell or their Fiddlers' Green....

Fiddlers' Green! Good God! Fiddlers' Green!

His mind flashed back a moment to the shining isle, the green sward, the
singing waves, the sunlight on the green jalousies, but strangely his
mind could see nothing. He could no longer make a picture for himself.
Symbols were barren algebraic formulae. Not enchanters' words. No light.
No glamour. Only strange sounds reverberating in the gray caverns of his
head.... Once in the dead past he could see the Isle of Pipers--no more!
It wasn't his past that was dead. The past lived. It was he was dead,
he, his present, his future.

Out of the gray caverns of his head came a thin echo of a word he had
known and he a boy. The Valley of the Black Pig. A phrase from some old
folk-tale heard on a wintry Antrim coast. Some prophecy of old wives
that when the Boar without Bristles would appear in the Valley of the
Black Pig, then the end of all things was nigh.... He had a faint memory
that somewhere in Roscommon was the Valley of the Black Pig.... But that
didn't matter; what mattered was the memory it evoked.... Gray, gray,
gray.... Gray hills, gray boulders, gray barren trees, a gray mist
sluggishly rising from the ground, and a gray drizzle of rain, falling,
so slowly.... And gray rotting leaves beneath his feet.... A little wind
that moaned among the boulders, and the cawing of unseen, horrible
birds.... Neither was there direction, nor time, nor space....
Everything gray like the grayness of old wo