A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT
A man here--one accustomed to the sea, but not a Shetlander--had told me
that seals come up on the rocks as the tide goes out, and are floated off
them as it comes up again--and this, indeed, I have seen. He did not seem
to think that they lay on the rocks independently of the tides, so, as
the tide to-day should be out about 5.30, I resolved to go to the same
place as yesterday--the accustomed haunt of seals here--about two, so as
to be in good time. I arrive accordingly, but what is my astonishment
to see, on a vast, sloping slab of rock, ending in a miniature cliff,
far above the highest line of moist seaweed, and comfortably independent
of all tides, twelve seals, of varying figures and different degrees
of obesity, lying, roughly, in two rows, and in all sorts of attitudes
and depths of repose. What a sight! What beautiful, fat, sleepy things!
and what a lovely little secret creek of the wave-lashed, iron-ribbed
coast have they found to sleep in! How the waters sleep in it, too! How
gently they creep to shores strewn with a wild confusion of titanic black
boulders heaped about still huger fragments of the cliff's wastage, so
huge, some of them, that they are dwarfed only by the frowning precipices
that tower behind! How they lick up upon the brown hanging seaweed that
drips against the high, dark walls of this their boudoir, falling back
from it again with a deep-sucked gurgle that ravishes the ear! What a
snug sea-chamber, formed and fashioned by the waves! How the cormorants
dive and fish in it, how the gull tears at the drifted carcase of its
kind, how the puffins, in ceaseless flight between ocean and their myriad
burrows, arch and dome it in! Oh, it is a fine apartment! Its portals
on either side are columns of spouting foam, and beyond lies the wild,
houseless sea. A seal's dormitory!--how well do the wild things choose!
So here, at once, one learns something different to what one is told.
Seals care nothing about tides when they can get great slanting slabs
that lie high and dry above them. At high tide, or low tide, or middle
tide, they are equally ready to sleep.
I came down the steep descent in a way which made me and everything I
had on, or carried with me--which was everything I have here to keep
me warm and dry--both wet and dirty. At the bottom there was a mass of
nasty, brown, wet discomfort; but it had successfully stalked the seals.
They lay now right before me, so near as to make the glasses almost a
superfluity. Yet how splendidly they showed them up--every mark, turn,
and expression, their whiskers, wrinkles, and their fine eyes. And now,
still more markedly than yesterday, I note that the favourite attitude
of a seal, when lying asleep or dozing, is either on its back or half
or three-quarters rolled over towards it. Out of all these twelve, only
one lies in the way that all illustrations persist in depicting them as
lying. Three are absolutely on their backs, with their faces, or rather
chins, looking, for long periods, straight up into the sky; others are
almost as supine, but, by turning their faces sideways, seem to be less
so, whilst the rest vary between this and full on their side, in which
position they look much like a huge salmon lying on a fishmonger's
dresser. Who has ever drawn seals like this? Where is there such a
rendering? Always, as far as I can remember, they are made to lie on
their stomachs. Yet here is the living thing.
As various as their attitudes seems to be the degree of their rest.
Some raise their heads and look to this side or that, at irregular
intervals that are not very long apart. Others seem sunk in deep and
heavy slumber, their very attitudes--or rather, their attitudes more than
anything else--expressing "the rapture of repose that's there." Yet even
these, if watched for long enough, are seen occasionally to raise their
heads, or scratch themselves lazily with their front paws, or expand or
interlace their hind ones, moving them sometimes in a very curious manner
suggesting the rotating screw of a steamer. It would seem, therefore,
that, however fast asleep they may look, they are really only in a sort
of doze.
Many of these seals are scarred and marked in a very bad way; raw and
bleeding the places are sometimes, and I notice here and there what
looks like a deep and gaping bite. These wounds are mostly on the belly,
but the tail of one seal is bloody all round, as though another had
seized it in its mouth and severely bitten it. No doubt it is all due
to fighting, and the claws, I think, must have played as great a part
as the teeth. Two other seals lie on a smaller rock, raised similarly
above high-water mark, and a third on one that has only just become
uncovered. Altogether, then, there are fifteen of them, making me think
of Virgil's description of the Protean herds, written in those happy days
before the accursed gun had thinned, as it now has, almost to the verge
of extinction, the brave, honest, animal world. Surely the lower thing
rules on earth for ever. Those who love living animals, with souls inside
them, must see this world made dead and empty by those who love only
their skins, stuffed with straw. They conquer, these Philistines, and
the finer-touched spirit lies bleeding and suffering beneath them. How
grossly we deceive ourselves!... I say that the "pale Galilean" has _not_
conquered here, but that Thor has, though often in his rival's name.
The modern Christian poet speaks truth as though it were falsehood, and
falsehood as though it were truth. Hear Longfellow, for instance--
Force rules the world still,
Has ruled it, shall rule it,
Meekness is weakness,
Strength is triumphant,
Over the whole earth
Still is it Thor's-Day!
Now that is truth--simple, plain truth. So it is put into the mouth of
Thor--a heathen god--who, of course, is brought up only to be knocked
down, and what he says confuted. Only through some such machinery can
poets now speak the truth.
These seals differ greatly from one another, both in size, figure,
markings, and colour of the fur, and especially, as a result of all, in
beauty. Most of them look rough, swollen, dropsical creatures, but some
are very pretty and elegant, and as these are smaller I suppose them to
be the females. Often one may see a look and action in them that seems to
speak of coquetry and being wooed.
It is curious that the one seal that lies on its face is the only one out
of the twelve that is turned towards the sea. The sea, however, in this
case is only a narrow inlet between the rock on which it lies and the
shore, the great expanse of it being entirely hidden by the rock itself,
which rises perpendicularly, like a cliff, from the highest point of its
upward slope. The seal, therefore, really looks shorewards, but across a
narrow strip of sea. His eyes, I notice, seem never shut, and at frequent
intervals he turns his head to one side or another. All the rest lie
either sleeping or dozing, though, as said before, most of them from time
to time raise their heads a little and give a lazy look before sinking
back into slumber. Is the one seal a sentinel? It looks like it. But why,
if this were their custom, should seals ever sleep singly? And this they
often do.
In spite of the shortness of all their four limbs, yet seals, as they
stretch themselves, throw up the head, bend the neck and back, raise
their fore-feet into the air, or push out the hind ones to their full
length whilst at the same time stretching them apart, often have a
very startling resemblance to a man. The curves and symmetries of the
body--especially the upper portion of it--are sometimes wonderfully
suggestive of the human torso, and the resemblance is often helped by
the shape of the rock, which, by curving away from the body, allows the
lines of it to appear. Nothing, in fact, can look both more like and more
unlike a man than do these creatures. See one lying quiescent, a great,
swollen, carrot-shaped bladder, and one may scoff at the possibility
of any such resemblance; but wait and watch, and in a hundred odd ways
one will catch it. When a seal scratches one of his front flippers it
is wonderfully like a man scratching the back of one hand with the
other. The hind feet can look almost more hand-like. It is true that
when the toes are distended to their full width the whole foot is just
like a fish's tail in shape, but when they are not stretched so widely
apart, and those of the one play, as they often do, with those of the
other, then they have a wonderful resemblance to fingers--swollen, gouty
fingers, it is true; gloved, too, they look--but still fingers.
Another interesting sight now in the adjoining cove, or rather in the
adjoining half of this semi-divided one! A seal comes to its rock there
before the tide has sufficiently gone down to let it lie upon it. It
plays about the rock, fawns upon it, caresses it, woos it, one might say,
dives down and circumnavigates it, tries or pretends to try to lie upon
it, even under the water, swims away and returns, and does the same thing
several times; and as soon as the water is sufficiently shallow to allow
of it, it reclines, sea-washed and gently heaving, till the receding tide
leaves it high and dry. A pretty thing it is--very--to see a seal thus
waiting for its chosen rock to appear.
I was at the ledges about twelve, and found my particular one a
blank--not a bird there. Mother and child--father too, and every other
bird besides--was off; the cupboard was bare. A bitter disappointment
seized hold upon me, sunk into my very soul. Yet what else could I have
expected? They may have gone in the night; and, in any case, how, except
by actually bivouacking above that ledge, could I have hoped to be there
at the exact moment when the departure took place? This I might have
managed, or at least have managed better, had my little black sentry-box
been a cottage, with some one in it to cook for me. Then I could have
got to bed by eight, or at least nine, and been up by three or four; but
without this it was impossible. I can do--and I do now--with as little
as most men, but porridge here is like charity, and oh, the time that it
takes to make! They talked to me of ten minutes or a quarter of an hour
at the outside, spoke even of boiling milk flung upon the raw meal--said
it would be good like that. "Women said so, that will say anything."
Sweetly they smiled, but they understood not the conditions. Oh fire
that will not burn up! Oh kettle that will not boil! Oh egg that _will_
crack when you drop it in! Oh one spoon that goeth a-missing! This, and
much more "of this harness," as the Spaniard says, has kept me up till
ten or later--till eleven, once, when the frying bacon, "in the very
moment of projection," was breathed on by the flame of paraffin. (Nothing
but paraffin will make a fire burn up in the Shetlands, and even that
gets damp sometimes.) So that, having my notes to extend and decipher,
and with hard boards, and the wind, and a flea or so, and sometimes the
lumbago, I may say, with Comus, almost any night, "What has night to do
with sleep?" but without being able to continue, for certainly it has no
"better sweets to prove."
But perhaps I should have missed it in any case. Perhaps--nay, I will
be certain of it, to lessen heart-ache--they went off in the night. To
think of it! that young, tiny creature! And was it then, in the dark
night, when the wind was blowing so furiously, that you were carried
down--a little soft, fluffy, delicate-looking thing--to be put upon the
great tumultuous sea? through mist and driving spray, with neither moon
nor stars to light you, to toss, for the first time in life, on those
tumbling, rough-playing waves? I, a grown man, was glad of all I could
heap on my bed to keep the wind away. I lay and thought of ship-wrecks
as I listened to it roaring, but I never thought of you, flitting out to
sea through it all, cradled so delicately on your mother's back--if that,
indeed, was the way of it. How could I imagine it? Even to watch you,
as you lay warm on your cold ledge in the daytime, gave me the lumbago,
though wrapped in two good plaids. But at night, and with nothing round
you, to leave even _that_ shelter, to cast off from the sheer, horrid
edge "into the empty, vast, and wandering air," and then souse into
yeasty salt water, without cold or chill taken, without a touch of
lumbago--oh, what an iron constitution! _You_ are not the lathe painted
to look like iron; you are feathers in steelwork, rather, a powder-puff
made out of adamant. But here I register a vow that I will return here,
some day, in the height of the putting-off season, and see the little
guillemots fly from their cliff's cradle, or ride down on one cradle to
another--their mother's soft, warm back, and then
In cradle of the rude, imperious surge.