On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg

A dark cliff came to view behind the last point, it was coal black from the volcanic mineral diorite, and, as he approached it, he became depressed. The black crystallized mass seemed to have been cast up from the sea bottom, and after hardening had come into a terrible fight with water or a thundercloud and had cracked into eight parts, which had afterwards been carried away by the sea and ice or dragged down into the depth. Steep, perpendicular stood the black glittering wall out along the little harbor, and when the boat landed below it he felt as though he was down in a coal mine or a sooty blacksmith's shop. It depressed and awed him, he climbed up on the cliff, there rose as a landmark a pole with a white painted keg at the top. This trace of human beings out here where no people were to be seen, was a mixed reminder of gibbet, shipwreck, coal, a crude contrast between the unmixed colorless colors, black and white, of barren violent nature devoid of organic life, there being no lichens or moss on the whole body of the rock; further, this carpentry work without vegetable transition between primeval nature and human hand work, was irritating, disquieting and brutal. In the great Sunday stillness he heard beneath his feet, where stones had rattled down and formed a roof over a crevice, how the long breakers sucked in half way under the point, and pressed the air forward with muffled sound, then drew back again with a hissing and hollow sighing.

He stood a moment enjoying the oppression, while his thoughts wandered back to old memories which always brought him loathing. He smelt coal gas, saw manufactories, sooty, discontented people, heard machinery, city rumbling and human voices, which spoke words that would eat their way through his ears into his brain and sow seeds that would spring up as weeds smothering his own sowing; transforming the field he had cultivated with so much pains to a wild meadow like those of the others.

He climbed into his boat and turned his back on the gloomy sight; again he enjoyed the infinite purity of the waters, the empty blue which like an unwritten slate lay soothingly before him, for it did not raise any memories, develop any inspirations, or call forth any strong sensations. And now when he approached a larger island, he greeted it as a new acquaintance who should tell him something else and efface the recent impressions. New points and rocks were passed, each offering its surprise, its special physiognomy, often with such small differences that it required a sharply trained eye to see them. These small cliffs, which seemed so naked, so tiresomely alike when viewed from a passing boat, offered at nearer view the most changeable scenery, just as variance of the same coins only to the numismatist betray their secrets.

He now landed on a somewhat larger islet whose irregular jagged appearance had allured him, especially when he saw protruding over the tops of the rocks the crowns of trees with dense foliage. When he had climbed up on the northern point, the black base of which was polished smooth by the waves, he saw that the island was a cluster of at least four others, that seemed to have been drifted together by different winds, and by the congestion of different geological formations, forming a whole conglomerate of landscape pictures, brought from every zone. The northern part was composed of a cone of hornblende schist which, down on the strand, was cleft in enormous blocks that had fallen from the rocky wall, and was as yet unpolished by the water, while between these cubes grew strangely, as though allured by secret sympathy, an immense number of black currant shrubs, dusky in color and harmonizing in tone with the black sparkling stones. It was so unexpected to find these cultured deserters from the garden out here in the wilderness that it appeared as a joke of nature, perhaps laid in the bill of a wounded black-cock that had flown out here to die, carrying the seeds of dawning culture. Farther up in the rock pile stood a grove of deciduous trees with light verdure, but with cut tops and white trunks, as though whitewashed with lime by fostering human hand. He tried from a distance to guess their species, but they were so different from all others he had seen in this latitude that his thoughts revolved between acacias, beeches and Japan varnish trees, so common in southern Europe, and when he finally heard the well known rustle of the common aspen he would not believe his ears. He quickly shunned a viper, which ran down between two stones like a stream of water, and coming nearer, he saw that he had heard aright. It was the slender and trim aspen of the groves and pastures, that the northern wind, stony ground, drifting ice and salt water had pruned and trained to this unrecognizable variety, and which in the battle against tempest and cold had turned gray and lost its top, and therefore only consisted of frozen sprouts that were continually shooting out indefatigably renewing themselves, while the goats had peeled off the protecting bark and let the sap run out. There was eternal youth in those soft light green shoots on the gray whiskered branchless trunk, old age without maturity, an abnormality which was refreshing because it was new and transcended the banal.

When he had climbed up between the sharp stones and reached the height it was as if he had ascended a field in ten minutes. The region of deciduous trees lay below him, and upon the plateau appeared already the alpine flora, with the field form of the juniper, and close by the veritable northern cloud berry in the white moss of the moist crevices, and here and there the little civilized cornel, perhaps the only Swedish shrub on the seaboard. He slowly descended the southern slope, through cowberry and bearberry vines, hair grass, sedges, cotton grass and springy mosses, until suddenly he stood on a ravine, where the islet had cracked and formed a channel between the black rocky walls.

With wild shrieks the saucy auks flew up as he stepped on a natural stone bridge across the shallow channel, climbed another cliff of lighter formations, and reached a new section of this wonderful islet.

The light elegant eurite, in which faint rose-colored feldspar was mingled with a delicate blue-green quartz while mica was only betrayed through a glistening like microscopical hoar frost, gave the little landscape a gay aspect, and being cleft infinitely, it offered sofas and real armchairs at every step. A compact vein of granular white limestone passed as a belt straight through the rocky mass, and the fertile gravel from this which had crumbled from rain and frost, was amassed below between the rocky walls. And here a ravine began to present such an enchanting view that he stopped amazed and sat down on one of the stone stools to enjoy the surprising fairy scenery.

Before him, between the perpendicular walls whose bases disappeared in the soil, there unfolded a grassy carpet interwoven with endless flowers, choicer and more thrifty than those on the mainland. The blood red geranium had stepped from the rock and sought moisture down here, the honey white grass of Parnassus from the wet sedgy mead had here met with the forest's blue yellow lily of the valley, and the southern orchids, perhaps wind driven from the vineland Gotland, had fled here, the hyacinth like orchis-sambucina, the pompous orchis militaris, the stately cephalanthera, a kind of embellished lily of the valley, had sought their nursery here in the forcing lime and moist sea air between protecting walls in the most luxurious grass.

And far in the distance the walls of the cliffs were hidden by birch and alder trees, which rose modestly in the air without daring to raise their tops to the wind; self-sown here and there stood the cranberry trees in the midst of the grassy carpet, with their white snowballs hanging to the grapelike leaf; the dark green buckthorn leaned like an espalier against the precipice and its glossy leaves faintly reminded of the orange so famed in song, but were more juicy, more varied in color, finer in design and more delicate structure.

It was a park with the characteristics of the mainland floating out here, and when through a rent or depression in the rocks he saw a blue horizontal streak of the sea, the contrast in the wonderful scenery struck him.