THROUGH BARS OF ICE
A day should be praised at night;
A sword when it is tried;
Ice when it is crossed.
Ha'vama'l
A dim line of snowy islands, so far apart that it was hard to believe
they were only the ice-tipped summits of Greenland's towering coast,
stretched across the horizon. Standing at Helga's side in the bow, Alwin
gazed at them earnestly.
"To think," he marvelled, "that we have come to the very last land on
this side of the world! Suppose we were to sail still further west? What
is it likely that we would come to? Does the ocean end in a wall of ice,
or would we fall off the earth and go tumbling heels over head through
the darkness--? By St. George, it makes one dizzy!"
Helga's ideas were not much clearer. It was nearly five hundred years
before the time of Columbus. But she knew one thing that Alwin did not
know.
"Greenland is not the most western land," she corrected. "There is
another still further west, though no one knows how big it is or who
lives in it."
She turned, laughing, to where young Haraldsson sat counting the wealth
of his pouch and calculating how valuable could be the presents he could
afford to bestow on his arrival.
"Sigurd, do you remember that western land Biorn Herjulfsson saw? and
how we were wont to plan to run away to it, when I grew tired of
embroidering and Leif kept you overlong at your exercises?"
"I have not thought of it since those days," laughed Sigurd. He swept
the mass of gold and silver trinkets back into the velvet pouch at his
belt, and came over and joined them. "What fine times we had planning
those trips, over the fire in the evenings! By Saint Michael, I think we
actually started once; have you forgotten?--in the long-boat off
Thorwald's whaling vessel! And you wore a suit of my clothes, and fought
me because I said anyone could tell that you were a girl."
Helga's laughter rang out like a chime of bells. "Oh, Sigurd I had
forgotten it! And we had nothing with us to eat but two cheeses! And
Valbrand had to launch a boat and come after us!"
They abandoned themselves to their mirth, and Alwin laughed with them;
but his curiosity had been aroused on another subject.
"I wish you would tell me something concerning this farther land," he
said, as soon as he could get them to listen. "Does it in truth exist,
or is it a tale to amuse children with?"
They both assured him that it was quite true.
"I myself have talked with one of the sailors who saw it," Sigurd
explained. "He was Biorn's steersman. He saw it distinctly. He said that
it looked like a fine country, with many trees."
"If it was a real country and no witchcraft, it is strange that he
contented himself with looking at it. Why did he not land and explore?"
"Biorn Herjulfsson is a coward," Helga said contemptuously. "Every man
who can move his tongue says so."
Sigurd frowned at her. "You give judgment too glibly. I have heard many
say that he is a brave man. But he was not out on an exploring voyage;
he was sailing from Iceland to Greenland, to visit his father, and lost
his way. And he is a man not apt to be eager in new enterprises.
Besides, it may be that he thought the land was inhabited by dwarfs."
"There, you have admitted that I am right!" Helga cried triumphantly.
"He was afraid of the dwarfs; and a man who is afraid of anything is a
coward."
But Sigurd could fence with his tongue as well as with his sword. "What
then is a shield-maiden who is afraid of her kinswoman?" he parried. And
they fell to wrangling laughingly between themselves.
Unheeding them, Alwin gazed away at the mysterious blue west. His eyes
were big with great thoughts. If he had a ship and a crew,--if he could
sail away exploring! Suppose kingdoms could be founded there!
Suppose--his imaginings became as lofty as the drifting clouds, and as
vague; so vague that he finally lost interest in them, and turned his
attention to the approaching shore. They had come near enough now to see
that the scattered islands had connected themselves into a peaked coast,
a broken line of dazzling whiteness, except where dark chasms made blots
upon its sides.
But sighting Greenland and landing upon it were two very different
matters, he found. A little further, and they encountered the border of
drift-ice that, travelling down from the northeast in company with
numerous icebergs, closes the fiord-mouths in summer like a magic bar.
"I shall think it great luck if this breaks up so that we can get
through it in a month," Valbrand observed phlegmatically.
"A month?" Alwin gasped, overhearing him.
The old sailor looked at him in contempt. "Does a month seem long to
you? When Eric came here from Iceland, he was obliged to lie four months
in the ice."
Four months on shipboard, with nothing more cheerful to look at than
barren cliffs and a gray sea paved with grinding ice-cakes! The
consternation of Alwin's face was so great that Sigurd took pity on him
even while he laughed.
"It will not be so bad as that. And we will steer to a point north of
the fiord and lie there in the shelter of an island."
"Shelter!" muttered the English youth. "Twelve eiderdown beds would be
insufficient to shelter one from this wind."
Nor was the island of any more inviting appearance when finally they
reached it. What of it was not barren boulders was covered with black
lichens, the only hint of green being an occasional patch of moss
nestling in some rocky fissure. To heighten the effect, icy gales blew
continually, accompanied by heavy mists and chilling fogs.
Amid these inhospitable surroundings they were penned for two
weeks,--Norse weeks of but five days each, but seemingly endless to the
captives from the south. Editha retired permanently into the big
bear-skin sleeping-bag that enveloped the whole of her little person and
was the only cure for the chattering of her teeth. Alwin wrapped himself
in every garment he owned and as many of Sigurd's as could be spared,
and strove to endure the situation with the stoicism of his companions;
but now and then his disgust got the better of his philosophy.
"How intelligent beings can find it in their hearts to return to this
country after the good God has once allowed them to leave it, passes my
understanding!" he stormed, on the tenth day of this sorry picnicking.
"At first it was in my mind to fear lest such a small ship should sink
in such a great sea; now I only dread that it will not, and that we will
be brought alive to land and forced to live there."
Rolf regarded him with his amiable smile. "If your eyes were as blue as
your lips, and your cheeks were as red as your nose, you would be
considered a handsome man," he said encouragingly.
And again it was Sigurd who took pity on Alwin. "Bear it well; it will
not last much longer," he said. "Already a passage is opening. And
inside the fiord, much is different from what is expected."
Alwin smiled with polite incredulity.
The next day's sun showed a dark channel open to them, so that before
noon they had entered upon the broad water-lane known as Eric's Fiord.
The silence between the towering walls was so absolute, so death-like,
as to be almost uncanny. Mile after mile they sailed, between bleak
cliffs ice-crowned and garbed in black lichens; mile after mile further
yet, without passing anything more cheerful than a cluster of rocky
islands or a slope covered with brownish moss. The most luxuriant of the
islands boasted only a patch of crowberry bushes or a few creeping
junipers too much abashed to lift their heads a finger's length above
the earth.
Alwin looked about him with a sigh, and then at Sigurd with a grimace.
"Do you still say that this is pleasanter than drowning?" he inquired.
Sigurd met the fling with obstinate composure. "Are you blind to the
greenness of yonder plain? And do you not feel the sun upon you?"
All at once it occurred to Alwin that the icy wind of the headlands had
ceased to blow; the fog had vanished, and there was a genial warmth in
the air about him. And yonder,--certainly yonder meadow was as green as
the camp in Norway. He threw off one of his cloaks and settled himself
to watch.
Gradually the green patches became more numerous, until the level was
covered with nothing else. In one place, he almost thought he caught a
gleam of golden buttercups. The verdure crept up the snow-clad slopes,
hundreds and thousands of feet; and here and there, beside some foaming
little cataract tumbling down from a glacier-fed stream, a rhododendron
glowed like a rosy flame. They passed the last island, covered with a
copse of willows as high as a tall man's head, and came into an open
stretch of water bordered by rolling pasture lands, filled with daisies
and mild-eyed cattle. Sigurd clutched the English boy's arm excitedly.
"Yonder are Eric's ship-sheds! And there--over that hill, where the
smoke is rising--there is Brattahlid!"
"There?" exclaimed Alwin. "Now it was in my mind that you had told me
that Eric's house was built on Eric's Fiord."
"So it is,--or two miles from there, which is of little importance. Oh,
yes, it stands on the very banks of Einar's Fiord; but since that is a
route one takes only when he visits the other parts of the settlement,
and seldom when he runs out to sea--Is that a man I see upon the
landing?"
"If they have not already seen us and come down to meet us, their eyes
are less sharp than they were wont to be three years ago," Rolf began;
when Sigurd answered his own question.
"They are there; do you not see? Crowds of them--between the sheds.
Someone is waving a cloak. By Saint Michael, the sight of Normandy did
not gladden me like this!"
"Let down sail! drop anchor, and make the boats ready to lower," came in
Valbrand's heavy drone.