IX

IX

THE DAY OF OUR departure arrived. On the eve, the kind Mr. Thomson had brought us urgent letters of introduction to Count Trampe, the Governor of Iceland, Mr. Pictursson, the bishop’s suffragan, and Mr. Finsen, mayor of Reykjavik. By way of thanks, my uncle gave him his warmest handshake.

On the 2nd, at six in the morning, all our precious luggage was put aboard the Valkyrie. The captain led us to rather narrow cabins under the deck.

“Do we have favorable winds?” my uncle asked.

“Excellent,” replied Captain Bjarne; “wind from the south-east. We’ll leave the Sound full speed, with all sails set.”

A few moments later the schooner, under her mizzen, brigantine, topsail, and topgallant sails, loosed from her moorings and ran at full sail through the strait. An hour later, the capital of Denmark seemed to sink below the distant waves, and the Valkyrie skirted the coast of Elsinore. In my nervous state 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 us! Perhaps you’d accompany us to the center of the globe, to find the solution for your eternal doubts!”

But nothing appeared on the ancient walls. The castle is, at any rate, much more recent than the heroic prince of Denmark. It now serves as a sumptuous lodge for the doorkeeper of the Sound’s straits, where fifteen thousand ships of all nations pass every year.

Kronberg Castle soon disappeared in the mist, as did the tower of Helsingborg, built on the Swedish coast, and the schooner leaned slightly under the breezes of the Kattegat.u

The Valkyrie was a fine sailboat, but you never know just what to expect from a ship under sail. She transported coal, household goods, earthenware, woolen clothing, and a cargo of wheat to Reykjavik. Five crewmen, all Danes, were enough to navigate her.

“How long will the passage take?” my uncle asked the captain.

“About ten days,” the captain replied, “if we don’t run into too much north-west wind around the Faroes.”

“But so you don’t expect to incur any considerable delay?”

“No, Mr. Lidenbrock, don’t worry, we’ll get there.”

Toward evening the schooner sailed around Cape Skagen at the northernmost point of Denmark, crossed the Skagerrak during the night, passed by the tip of Norway at Cape Lindesnes,v and entered the North Sea.

Two days later, we sighted the coast of Scotland near Peterhead, and the Valkyrie turned toward the Faroe Islands, passing between the Orkneys and the Shetlands.

Soon the schooner was hit by the waves of the Atlantic; it had to tack against the north wind, and reached the Faroes not without some difficulty. On the 8th, the captain sighted Mykines, the easternmost of these islands,w and from that moment he took a straight course toward Cape Portland on the southern coast of Iceland.

Nothing unusual occurred during the passage. I bore the troubles of the sea pretty well; my uncle, to his own intense disgust and his even greater shame, was sick all the way.

He was therefore unable to converse with Captain Bjarne about the Snaefells issue, the connections and means of transportation; he had to put off these explanations until his arrival, and spent all his time lying down in his cabin, whose wooden paneling creaked under the onslaught of the waves. But it must be said that he deserved his fate a little.

On the 11th we reached Cape Portland. The clear weather gave us a good view of Myrdals Jökull, which dominates it. The cape consists of a big hill with steep sides, planted on the beach all by itself.

The Valkyrie kept at a reasonable distance from the coast, sailing along it on a westerly course amidst great shoals of whales and sharks. Soon an enormous perforated rock appeared, through which the sea dashed furiously. The Westmann islets seemed to rise out of the ocean like a sprinkling of rocks on a liquid plain. From that moment on, the schooner swung out to sea and sailed at a good distance round Cape Reykjanes, which forms the western point of Iceland.

The rough sea prevented my uncle from coming on deck to admire these coasts, shattered and beaten by southwestern winds.

Forty-eight hours later, at the end of a storm that forced the schooner to flee with the sails down, we sighted the beacon of point Skagenx in the east, whose dangerous rocks extend into the sea under the surface. An Icelandic pilot came on board, and in three hours the Valkyrie dropped her anchor before Reykjavik, in Faxa Bay.

The professor emerged from his cabin at last, a bit pale, a bit downcast, but still full of enthusiasm, and with a look of satisfaction in his eyes.

The population of the town, intensely interested in the arrival of a vessel from which every one expected something, gathered on the quay.

My uncle was in a hurry to leave his floating prison, or rather hospital. But before stepping off the deck of the schooner he pulled me to the front, and pointed with his finger to the north of the bay at a tall mountain with two peaks, a double cone covered with perpetual snow.

“The Snaefells!” he exclaimed. “The Snaefells!”

Then, after having ordered me with a gesture to keep absolute silence, he climbed down into the boat which was waiting for him. I followed, and soon we set foot on the soil of Iceland.

First of all, a good-looking man in a general’s uniform appeared. He was, however, nothing but a magistrate, the governor of the island, Baron Trampe himself. The professor realized whom he was facing. He handed him his letters from Copenhagen, and a short conversation in Danish ensued, to which I remained for good reason completely alien. But the result of this first conversation was that Baron Trampe placed himself entirely at the service of Professor Lidenbrock.

My uncle was very cordially received by the mayor, Mr. Finsen, no less military in appearance than the governor, but just as peaceful in temperament and office.

As for the bishop’s suffragan, Mr. Pictursson, he was at that moment carrying out an episcopal visit in the northern diocese; for the time being, we had to put off being introduced to him. But Mr. Fridriksson, professor of natural sciences at the school of Reykjavik, was a charming man whose assistance became very valuable to us. This modest scholar spoke only Danish and Latin; he offered his services to me in the language of Horace, and I felt that we were made to understand each other. He was, in fact, the only person with whom I could converse during our stay in Iceland.

This excellent man put at our disposition two out of the three rooms of which his house consisted, and we were soon installed there with our luggage, the quantity of which astonished the inhabitants of Reykjavik a little.

“Well, Axel,” my uncle said to me, “we’re making progress, and the worst is over.”

“What do you mean, the worst!” I exclaimed.

“Of course, now we have nothing left but going down.”

“If you mean it like that, you’re right; but after all, after we go down, we’ll have to go up again, I imagine?”

“Oh, that barely worries me! Come, there’s no time to lose! I’m going to the library. Perhaps it has some manuscript of Saknussemm’s that I’d like to take a look at.”

“Well, in the meantime, I’ll go visit the city. Won’t you do that also?”

“Oh, that doesn’t really interest me. What’s remarkable about Icelandic soil is not above but underneath.”

I went out, and wandered wherever chance happened to lead me.

It would not be easy to lose your way in Reykjavik. So I had no need to ask for directions, which leads to many mistakes in the language of gestures.

The town extends over low and marshy ground between two hills. An immense bed of lava borders on it on one side, and falls gently towards the sea. On the other side lies the vast bay of Faxa, bounded in the north by the enormous glacier of the Snaefells, where the Valkyrie was at the moment the only ship at anchor. Usually the English and French fish-patrols anchor here, but just then they were cruising on the eastern coast of the island.

The longer one of Reykjavik’s two streets runs parallel to the beach; here live the merchants and traders, in wooden cabins made of horizontal red boards; the other street, further west, leads to a little lake between the houses of the bishop and other non-commercial people.

I had soon explored these bleak and sad streets. Here and there I caught a glimpse of a bit of faded lawn, looking like an old wool carpet worn out by use, or of some semblance of a kitchen garden whose sparse vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, and lettuce, would have seemed appropriate for a Lilliputian table. A few sickly wallflowers were also trying to look as if they were graced by sunshine.

Toward the middle of the non-commercial street I found the public cemetery, enclosed by a mud wall, where it seemed plenty of room was left. Then, a few steps further, I arrived at the Governor’s house, a farmhouse compared to the town hall of Hamburg, a palace in comparison with the cabins of the Icelandic population.

Between the little lake and the town stood the church, built in Protestant style with burnt stones taken from the volcanoes themselves; in strong western winds its red roof tiles would obviously be scattered in the air, endangering the faithful.

From a neighboring hillside I saw the national school where, as I was informed later by our host, Hebrew, English, French, and Danish were taught, four languages of which, to my disgrace, I don’t know a single word.y I would have been last among the forty students at this little college, and unworthy of going to bed along with them in one of those closets with two compartments, where the more delicate would die of suffocation the very first night.

In three hours I had visited not only the town but its surroundings. Their aspect was peculiarly melancholy. No trees, no vegetation worth mentioning. Everywhere the bare edges of volcanic rocks. The Icelanders’ huts are made of earth and peat, and the walls lean inward. They resemble roofs placed on the ground. But these roofs are relatively fertile meadows. Due to the heat of the house, the grass grows there almost perfectly, and is carefully mown in the hay season; otherwise domestic animals would come to pasture on top of these green abodes.

During my excursion I met few people. When I returned to the commercial street I saw the greater part of the population busy drying, salting, and loading codfish, their main export item. The men seemed robust but heavy, blond Germans of sorts with pensive eyes, who feel a bit outside the rest of mankind, poor exiles relegated to this land of ice, whom nature should have created as Eskimos, since it had condemned them to live just outside the arctic circle! In vain did I try to detect a smile on their faces; they laughed sometimes with a kind of involuntary contraction of the muscles, but they never smiled.

Their clothes consisted of a coarse jacket of black wool called ‘vadmel’ in Scandinavian countries, a hat with a very broad brim, trousers with a narrow edge of red, and a piece of leather folded up as a shoe.

The women, with sad and resigned faces of a pleasant but expressionless type, wore a bodice and skirt of dark ‘vadmel’: unmarried women wore a little knitted brown cap over their braided hair; married women tied a colored handkerchief around their heads, topped with a peak of white linen.

After a good walk I returned to Mr. Fridriksson’s house, where I found my uncle already in the company of his host.