Page:A book of folk-lore (1913).djvu/159

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156
A BOOK OF FOLK-LORE

times over the moors, in an equally spectral sea and a driving fog. By degrees, not always in the same place nor at any fixed period, the idea of the Ship of Souls in the clouds materialised into actual boats in which the spirits of the dead were carried over, not to a mystical land of Magonia, but to actual islands or territories.

The western coast of Brittany, with its sheer granite cliffs starting out of an ever-boiling sea, but with its strange inland wave-less lakes of the Morbihan and the Gulf of Etel, and with its desolate wind-swept wolds, strewn with prehistoric monuments of the dead, more numerous than anywhere else, has been esteemed the gathering-place of souls seeking to be shipped either to the Isles of the Blessed, or to Britia, that is none other than Great Britain.

No place could have been selected more suitable for the purpose that the Pointe de Raz. Near it is the Bay of Souls. The rising and falling ground is barren. Here is the Tarn of Cleden, about which the skeletons of drowned men congregate and run after a stranger, imploring him to give them a winding-sheet and a grave.

Procopius, who died shortly after 543, tells us how that hence the souls of the