He kept silent and with a new motion he gave the boat another course.
They approached Svartbodan's sinister volcanic formation. The black sparkling diorite with its death-white landmark, called "the white mare," looked still more strikingly awful in the sun's rays, which in vain tried to lighten the extreme tones of its black and white.
A cloud passed over the girl's face, her expression shrunk, the eyebrows contracted in rolls as though they would drop down and shut out the depressing picture. A visible movement on the tiller signified that she would fall off from the skerry, but he gave the boat its course forwards, and with the wind's compressed power sped it into the ravine between the black cliffs where the sighing waves sucked it forwards.
It became silent in the boat, and the commissioner would not try to guess at the gloomy recollection that awoke in his companion, but limited himself to pointing to the bleached white skeleton of a long tailed duck, which was still left on the black ledge.
And the wind took the sails again, filled them and wafted the boat out onto the open sea.
They passed the rock with its single mountain ash and its wagtail and approached Sword Island where he for the first time had seen her. There they landed and he guided her the same way that he had passed that Sunday morning, and let her receive the same impressions that he had felt, led her down into the blooming field and showed her where, looking between the wild buckthorns, he had seen her for the first time.
She was now in a wanton mood because all these small observations, even the details of the circumstances, had remained in his memory and must signify that he was smitten. She laughed when he spoke of the first time he had heard her cough, and in a playful humor she told him to go down to the same place and speak and she would guess who it was that spoke.
He obeyed, and jumping down from the rocky footstool placed himself behind the white beam trees and imitated the bellowing of a bull.
"Nay, how beautiful he can sing," joked the girl. "It is surely a Hottentot actor."
The commissioner, who found pleasure in her childishness and had not played with children for many years, continued the role and stepping out on the green field with his coat turned inside out and the lorgnette hanging on one ear, he improvised a savage dance accompanied by a song that he had heard Hottentots sing in the Jardin d'Acclimatation.