Free Myles Away From Dublin by Flann O’Brien Page A

me and said: ‘Better dowse that cigarette. Here’s the bishop.’
    We were covering a Confirmation ceremony and there is not much to write about concerning that, for the Church is immutable and is ignored by the Daily Express.
    The bishop completely ignored both of us.
    ‘How well,’ I said savagely, ‘that thing at my feet looks. It’s not a butt but half a cigarette. For all the attention His Lordship paid, we might as well have been smoking cigars. Or long hookah pipes.’
    ‘Aw shut up. Smoking is very bad for you, anyway.’
Are You a Dowser?
    Yet out of an ill thing good comes. That phrase ‘Dowse that cigarette’ stayed in my mind. I thought the verb was incorrectly used and consulted my books of reference, my main idea being, I think, to tell off this unmannerly companion. But I forgot that little grudge when a new world opened before my eyes. True dowsing is nearly supernatural. If you dowse you are beside the gates of heaven, and the word has nothing to do with cigarettes or the equally poisonous activity of working for newspapers.
    Dowse is a word I have overlooked, perhaps becauseit has an enormous number of local slang equivalents. If one used some of them in mixed company, one might be accused of using bad language and told to leave. If only for that reason, I will forbear giving here a list of the equivalent words. But in usage the word dowse is largely misunderstood, or at least adequately ununderstood . Those who know the word think it is the cunning art of discovering water under the ground by some system of intuition that borders on witchcraft (for which gift decent women used to be roasted alive). My own dictionary, an expensive but notoriously infirm compilation, tells me that a ‘dowsing rod’ is ‘a name for the divining rod’ but is starkly silent as to what dowsing is or, indeed, divining. I suppose that so long as there are people in the world, they will publish dictionaries defining what is unknown in terms of something equally unknown. I am personally convinced that Einstein’s sums were wrong and that his atom bomb is a myth. Who will blast me out of my complacency? The British needed 100,000 tons of German bombs to blast them out of theirs.
    But let us get back to this strange word dowse.
The Great Gift
    Dowsing takes its place with soothsaying, curing sick cows by looking at them, and putting a curse on a fellow man. The persons who do that sort of thing – and they are mercifully scarce in towns and cities – do not know where power comes from, why they are thus endowed, but they do know that what they say, be it good or ill, will happen.
    Dowsing has that quality. I once spent a term in the Department of Local Government, inhabited at the time mostly by the sons of peasants. The local authority would write asking for permission to pay a gammy, bent, old man to find water. But they were down-faced by what we call (for want of a better word) Education.‘You ought to be aware,’ they were sternly told, ‘that the modern method of finding is by a geological survey.’ A Consulting Engineer had to be got, given twenty-five guineas plus travelling expenses, and his carefully-typed report explained that there was absolutely no water in the county. The local engineer would splutter: ‘That dirty tramp up the road in a condemned cottage would find enough water in ten minutes to flood Lough Erin and they wouldn’t let me hire him. I’m afraid there is no future for the hazel twig in the Customs House!’
That Twig
    One fallacy about dowsing is that the twig or bough must be of hazel. Provided the article is small and flexible, any tree will serve. The important part of it is the man holding it, and about him I can give no description or explanation. The man with this gift of divination is usually very ignorant, occasionally illiterate. Normally he is ignorant of the nature of his trust, and regards it as a bit of a laugh. The ancient Irish attributed great wisdom and insights to