ICELAND! BUT
WHAT NEXT?
The day for our departure arrived. The day before it our kind friend M.
Thomsen brought us letters of introduction to Count Trampe, the Governor of
Iceland, M. Picturssen, the bishop’s suffragan, and M. Finsen, mayor of Rejkiavik.
My uncle expressed his gratitude by tremendous compressions of both his hands.
On the 2nd, at six in the evening, all our precious baggage being safely
on board the Valkyria, the captain took us into a very narrow cabin.
“Is the wind favourable?” my uncle asked.
“Excellent,” replied Captain Bjarne; “a
sou’-easter. We shall pass down the Sound full speed, with all sails
set.”
In a few minutes the schooner, under her mizen, brigantine, topsail, and
topgallant sail, loosed from her moorings and made full sail through the
straits. In an hour the capital of Denmark seemed to sink below the distant
waves, and the Valkyria was skirting the coast by Elsinore. In my
nervous frame of mind I expected to see the ghost of Hamlet wandering on the
legendary castle terrace.
“Sublime madman!” I said, “no doubt you would approve
of our expedition. Perhaps you would keep us company to the centre of the
globe, to find the solution of your eternal doubts.”
But there was no ghostly shape upon the ancient walls. Indeed, the
castle is much younger than the heroic prince of Denmark. It now answers the
purpose of a sumptuous lodge for the doorkeeper of the straits of the Sound,
before which every year there pass fifteen thousand ships of all nations.
The castle of Kronsberg soon disappeared in the mist, as well as the
tower of Helsingborg, built on the Swedish coast, and the schooner passed
lightly on her way urged by the breezes of the Cattegat.
The Valkyria was a splendid sailer, but on a sailing vessel you
can place no dependence. She was taking to Rejkiavik coal, household goods,
earthenware, woollen clothing, and a cargo of wheat. The crew consisted of five
men, all Danes.
“How long will the passage take?” my uncle asked.
“Ten days,” the captain replied, “if we don’t
meet a nor’-wester in passing the Faroes.”
“But are you not subject to considerable delays?”
“No, M. Liedenbrock, don’t be uneasy, we shall get there in
very good time.”
At evening the schooner doubled the Skaw at the northern point of
Denmark, in the night passed the Skager Rack, skirted Norway by Cape Lindness,
and entered the North Sea.
In two days more we sighted the coast of Scotland near Peterhead,,and
the Valkyria turned her lead towards the Faroe Islands, passing
between the Orkneys and Shetlands.
Soon the schooner encountered the great Atlantic swell; she had to tack
against the north wind, and reached the Faroes only with some difficulty. On
the 8th the captain made out Myganness, the southernmost of these islands, and
from that moment took a straight course for Cape Portland, the most southerly
point of Iceland.
The passage was marked by nothing unusual. I bore the troubles of the
sea pretty well; my uncle, to his own intense disgust, and his greater shame,
was ill all through the voyage.
He therefore was unable to converse with the captain about Snæfell, the
way to get to it, the facilities for transport, he was obliged to put off these
inquiries until his arrival, and spent all his time at full length in his
cabin, of which the timbers creaked and shook with every pitch she took. It
must be confessed he was not undeserving of his punishment.
On the 11th we reached Cape Portland. The clear open weather gave us a
good view of Myrdals jokul, which overhangs it. The cape is merely a low hill
with steep sides, standing lonely by the beach.
The Valkyria kept at some distance from the coast, taking a
westerly course amidst great shoals of whales and sharks. Soon we came in sight
of an enormous perforated rock, through which the sea dashed furiously. The
Westman islets seemed to rise out of the ocean like a group of rocks in a
liquid plain. From that time the schooner took a wide berth and swept at a
great distance round Cape Rejkianess, which forms the western point of Iceland.
The rough sea prevented my uncle from coming on deck to admire these
shattered and surf-beaten coasts.
Forty-eight hours after, coming out of a storm which forced the schooner
to scud under bare poles, we sighted east of us the beacon on Cape Skagen,
where dangerous rocks extend far away seaward. An Icelandic pilot came on
board, and in three hours the Valkyria dropped her anchor before
Rejkiavik, in Faxa Bay.
The Professor at last emerged from his cabin, rather pale and
wretched-looking, but still full of enthusiasm, and with ardent satisfaction
shining in his eyes.
The population of the town, wonderfully interested in the arrival of a
vessel from which every one expected something, formed in groups upon the quay.
My uncle left in haste his floating prison, or rather hospital. But
before quitting the deck of the schooner he dragged me forward, and pointing
with outstretched finger north of the bay at a distant mountain terminating in
a double peak, a pair of cones covered with perpetual snow, he cried:
“Snæfell! Snæfell!”
Then recommending me, by an impressive gesture, to keep silence, he went
into the boat which awaited him. I followed, and presently we were treading the
soil of Iceland.
The first man we saw was a good-looking fellow enough, in a
general’s uniform. Yet he was not a general but a magistrate, the
Governor of the island, M. le Baron Trampe himself. The Professor was soon
aware of the presence he was in. He delivered him his letters from Copenhagen,
and then followed a short conversation in the Danish language, the purport of
which I was quite ignorant of, and for a very good reason. But the result of
this first conversation was, that Baron Trampe placed himself entirely at the
service of Professor Liedenbrock.
My uncle was just as courteously received by the mayor, M. Finsen, whose
appearance was as military, and disposition and office as pacific, as the
Governor’s.
As for the bishop’s suffragan, M. Picturssen, he was at that
moment engaged on an episcopal visitation in the north. For the time we must be
resigned to wait for the honour of being presented to him. But M. Fridrikssen,
professor of natural sciences at the school of Rejkiavik, was a delightful man,
and his friendship became very precious to me. This modest philosopher spoke
only Danish and Latin. He came to proffer me his good offices in the language
of Horace, and I felt that we were made to understand each other. In fact he
was the only person in Iceland with whom I could converse at all.
This good-natured gentleman made over to us two of the three rooms which
his house contained, and we were soon installed in it with all our luggage, the
abundance of which rather astonished the good people of Rejkiavik.
“Well, Axel,” said my uncle, “we are getting on, and
now the worst is over.”
“The worst!” I said, astonished.
“To be sure, now we have nothing to do but go down.”
“Oh, if that is all, you are quite right; but after all, when we
have gone down, we shall have to get up again, I suppose?”
“Oh I don’t trouble myself about that. Come, there’s
no time to lose; I am going to the library. Perhaps there is some manuscript of
Saknussemm’s there, and I should be glad to consult it.”
“Well, while you are there I will go into the town. Won’t
you?”
“Oh, that is very uninteresting to me. It is not what is upon this
island, but what is underneath, that interests me.”
I went out, and wandered wherever chance took me.
It would not be easy to lose your way in Rejkiavik. I was therefore
under no necessity to inquire the road, which exposes one to mistakes when the
only medium of intercourse is gesture.
The town extends along a low and marshy level, between two hills. An
immense bed of lava bounds it on one side, and falls gently towards the sea. On
the other extends the vast bay of Faxa, shut in at the north by the enormous
glacier of the Snæfell, and of which the Valkyria was for the time the
only occupant. Usually the English and French conservators of fisheries moor in
this bay, but just then they were cruising about the western coasts of the
island.
The longest of the only two streets that Rejkiavik possesses was
parallel with the beach. Here live the merchants and traders, in wooden cabins
made of red planks set horizontally; the other street, running west, ends at
the little lake between the house of the bishop and other non-commercial
people.
I had soon explored these melancholy ways; here and there I got a
glimpse of faded turf, looking like a worn-out bit of carpet, or some
appearance of a kitchen garden, the sparse vegetables of which (potatoes,
cabbages, and lettuces), would have figured appropriately upon a Lilliputian
table. A few sickly wallflowers were trying to enjoy the air and sunshine.
About the middle of the tin-commercial street I found the public
cemetery, inclosed with a mud wall, and where there seemed plenty of room.
Then a few steps brought me to the Governor’s house, a but
compared with the town hall of Hamburg, a palace in comparison with the cabins
of the Icelandic population.
Between the little lake and the town the church is built in the
Protestant style, of calcined stones extracted out of the volcanoes by their
own labour and at their own expense; in high westerly winds it was manifest
that the red tiles of the roof would be scattered in the air, to the great
danger of the faithful worshippers.
On a neighbouring hill I perceived the national school, where, as I was
informed later by our host, were taught Hebrew, English, French, and Danish,
four languages of which, with shame I confess it, I don’t know a single
word; after an examination I should have had to stand last of the forty
scholars educated at this little college, and I should have been held unworthy
to sleep along with them in one of those little double closets, where more
delicate youths would have died of suffocation the very first night.
In three hours I had seen not only the town but its environs. The
general aspect was wonderfully dull. No trees, and scarcely any vegetation.
Everywhere bare rocks, signs of volcanic action. The Icelandic buts are made of
earth and turf, and the walls slope inward; they rather resemble roofs placed
on the ground. But then these roofs are meadows of comparative fertility.
Thanks to the internal heat, the grass grows on them to some degree of
perfection. It is carefully mown in the hay season; if it were not, the horses
would come to pasture on these green abodes.
In my excursion I met but few people. On returning to the main street I
found the greater part of the population busied in drying, salting, and putting
on board codfish, their chief export. The men looked like robust but heavy,
blond Germans with pensive eyes, conscious of being far removed from their
fellow creatures, poor exiles relegated to this land of ice, poor creatures who
should have been Esquimaux, since nature had condemned them to live only just
outside the arctic circle! In vain did I try to detect a smile upon their lips;
sometimes by a spasmodic and involuntary contraction of the muscles they seemed
to laugh, but they never smiled.
Their costume consisted of a coarse jacket of black woollen cloth called
in Scandinavian lands a ‘vadmel,’ a hat with a very broad brim,
trousers with a narrow edge of red, and a bit of leather rolled round the foot
for shoes.
The women looked as sad and as resigned as the men; their faces were
agreeable but expressionless, and they wore gowns and petticoats of dark
‘vadmel’; as maidens, they wore over their braided hair a little
knitted brown cap; when married, they put around their heads a coloured
handkerchief, crowned with a peak of white linen.
After a good walk I returned to M. Fridrikssen’s house, where I
found my uncle already in his host’s company.
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