The Secret Tablet

St. Brendan and his companions come to a very high inaccessible island and cannot find an entrance. Having circled the island for a number of days, they see a church, and hear the voices of people singing and praising God. A waxen tablet is lowered to them, bidding them to cease trying to enter the island, that they will find the island which they seek, but that they must return home as their own people wish to see them; this is not the promised land ("non ista tibi terra promissa"). They leave the island, taking with them the tablet, which they used to read every day as if it had been sent to them by God."

- Seamus Mac Mathuna, "Contributions to a Study of the Voyages of St. Brendan and St. Malo," in Wooding, The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature