A Puffin Ghetto
There were hundreds of them in every family, and so many families that it resembled nothing so much as a puffin ghetto. I judged from the turmoil that they were screeching for "a place in the sun." The noise they made did not in the least accord with their respectable Quaker appearance. Shall I bring you one as a pet? Its austere presence would help you to remember your "latter end."
When I wrote you that there was ice about, I did not refer to the field ice through which we travelled on my way north. This is the real thing this time—icebergs, and lots of them. They call the little ones "growlers," and big and little alike are classed as "pieces of ice"! They are not my idea of a "piece" of anything. I know now what the Ancient Mariner meant when he said:
"And ice mast high came floating by
As green as emerald."
It exactly describes them, only it doesn't wholly describe them, for no one could. They loom up in every shape and size and variation of form, pinnacles and towers and battlements, stately palaces of glittering crystal, triumphal archways more gorgeous than ever welcomed a conqueror home. Sometimes they are shining white, too dazzling to look at; and sometimes they are streaked with great vivid bands of green and azure which are so unearthly and brilliant that I feel certain some fairy has dipped his brush in the solar spectrum and dabbed the colours on this gigantic palette.
A sea without these jewels of the Arctic will forever look barren and unfinished to me after this. Even the sailors, who know too well what a menace they are to their craft, yield to their beauty a mute and grudging homage. To sit in the sun or the moonlight, and watch a heavy sea hurling mountains of water and foam over one of these ocean monarchs is a never-to-be-forgotten experience. So too it is to listen to the thunder of one of them "foundering"; for their equilibrium is very unstable, and the action of the sea, as they travel southwards to their death in the Gulf Stream, cuts them away at the surface of the water. Blocks weighing unbelievable tons crash off them, or they will suddenly, without a second's warning, break into a million pieces. I can never conquer a creepiness of the spine as I listen to one of these tragedies. It is a startling, new sensation such as we never expect to meet again after childhood has shut its doors on us. In the quiet that follows the gigantic disintegration one half expects to see a new heaven and a new earth emerge out of the chaos of ice quivering in the water.
You often warned me in the course of the past year how dull life would be. You knew how I loved a city. I still do. But the last word on earth one could apply to the life here is "dull." Nature takes care of that. I defy you to walk along any street in London and see six porpoises and a whale! That is what I saw this morning. Oh! of course you may counter by telling me that neither can I see an automobile or a fire engine, but I have you, because I can answer that I have seen them already. How are you going to get out of that corner, except by saying that you do not want to see the old porpoises and whales and bergs?—and I know your "Scotch" conscience forbids such distortion of facts.
I have come to believe in the personality of porpoises. They swam beside the ship, playing about in the water all the while, rolling over and diving, and chasing each other just as if they knew they had a "gallery." We did not reward them very well either, for the Prophet shot one, and we ate bits of him for lunch—the porpoise, I mean, not the Prophet. I thought he would make a good companion-piece for the polar bear, and he was quite edible. He only needed a rasher of bacon to make you believe he was calf's liver.
So you see that between puffins and porpoises and whales, and "growlers" and lost dories, I crowded enough into one day to give me dreams that Alice in Wonderland might covet.