“Jan Jansen never shed a tear when he heard of the death of the two beings he had loved far better than any one else on earth, but he never smiled again. He built himself a small cottage and tilled a little farm quite close to the graveyard of Dergen, and in sight of the sea. Years softened the poor man’s grief, and to many an earnest child-listener, not a few of whom have long ago gone grey and passed away from earth, he used to tell the tale of his strange adventures in the far-off sea of ice.
“It was on winter evenings, when the snow was sifting in beneath Jan Jansen’s cottage door, and the roar of the wind mingling with the dash of the waves on the cliffs beneath, that Jan would draw closer to the fire, and rake the blazing peat together till the shadows danced and flickered on the walls: then his little friends felt sure that he was going to repeat to them his strange, strange story.
“‘But I never told you, did I,’ old Jan would say, ‘of the lonely island of Alba, in the frozen ocean?’
“He had told them scores of times, but the tale never palled upon them.
“‘Yes, yes, Father Jan,’ they would cry, ‘but we have quite forgotten a great deal that you told us. Do tell us once again of that wonderful island, and all the strange things you saw there.’
“And Jan would begin, keeping his eyes on the fire, as if the curling smoke and the blazing peat aided his recollections.
“‘It was almost summer when the good brig Danish Queen left Shetland. A favouring breeze filled our sails, and in less than fourteen days we made the ice, and the ripple left the water, but still the wind blew fair. Onward we ploughed our way in the sturdy brig, now through fields of floating slush and snow, now through streams of small bergs, but little larger than sheep or swans. Farther north still, and the bergs grew as large as oxen, then as big as elephants, then bigger than houses, then bigger than churches; and as they rose and fell on the smooth dark billows they threatened us every moment with destruction. Then we knew we had at last reached the sea of perpetual ice; ’twas the season of the year when the sun never sets, but goes on day and night, round and round in the cold blue sky, where never a cloud is seen. We saw strange birds and beasts in the water and on the ice, beasts that glared at us with a stony fearless stare, and birds that floated so close we could have captured them by hand. The beautiful snowbird, with plumage more white than the lily’s petal, with eyes and legs of crimson, and bill of jet; the wild pilot bird, and a hundred curious gulls, and little sparrow-like birds that fluttered from berg to berg in the breeze, as if it were very much against their will they were there at all; and flocks of curious blackbirds with white mottled breasts, that laughed in the air as they flew around us, with a sound like the voices of little children just let loose from school. We saw the lonely narwhal, the unicorn of the sea, with his one long ivory horn appearing and disappearing in the black waters as he pursued his prey. Seals in thousands popped their heads above the water to stare at us with their beautiful eyes; sea cows basked on the snowy bergs; whales played their gigantic fountains on every side of us; and the great Greenland bear, king of these regions of ice, stalked majestically around on many a floe, waiting a chance to pounce on some unwary seal.
“‘Northwards still, and now we sailed into an open sea, where no icebergs were anywhere visible—nothing but water, water, wherever we looked, except on the northern horizon, where was one small snowy cone, no bigger it would seem than a sugar-loaf. Taller and taller and broader and broader it grew, as we sailed towards it, till it formed itself into a lofty table-land, and we found ourselves under the ice-bound cliffs of the Isle of Alba.
“‘Imagine if you can a large and mountainous island covered with the snows of ages, with one gigantic cone, the shaft of an extinct volcano, towering upwards until lost in the heavens; imagine all around an ocean of inky blackness, a sky above of cloudless blue, with a sun like a rayless disc of molten silver; imagine neither sight nor sound of life, saving the mournful cry of the wheeling sea-bird, or the sullen plunge of the narwhal and whale; and imagine if you can the feeling of being all alone in such a place, where foot of mortal man had never been planted before.
“‘But for all this, little recked the brave crew of the Danish Queen, for we found the ivory we had braved every danger to seek.