I cannot say that all is peace, though, beyond the wooden walls of the Arrandoon, for a storm is raging with almost hurricane violence, sweeping down from the hills with ever-varying force, and threatening to tear the vessel from her anchorage. Steam is up, the screw revolves, and it taxes all the engineer’s skill to keep up to the anchors so as to avert the strain from them.
But our boys are used to danger by this time, and there is hardly a moment’s lull in the conversation. Even Sandie McFlail, M.D. o’ Aberdeen, has already forgotten all the horrors of mal-de-mer; he even believes he has found his sea-legs, and feels all over as good a sailor as anybody.
“Reikjavik?” says Ralph; “isn’t it a queer break-jaw kind of a name. It puts one in mind of a mouthful of exceedingly tough beefsteak.”
“A gastronomic simile,” says Rory; “though maybe neither poetical nor elegant, sure, but truly Saxon.”
“Ah! weel,” the doctor says, in his quiet, thoughtful, canny way, “I dinna know now. Some o’ the vera best poetry of all ages bears reference to the pleesures o’ the table. Witness Horace’s Odes, for instance.”
“Hear! hear!” from Allan; and “Horace was a brick!” from honest English Ralph; but Rory murmurs “Moore?”
“But,” continues the doctor, “to my ear there is nothing vera harsh in the language that these islanders speak. They pronounce the ‘ch’ hard, like the Scotch; their ‘j’s’ soft, like the Spanish; and turn their ‘w’s’ into ‘v’s.’ They pronounce church—kurk; and the ‘j’ is a ‘y,’ or next thing to it. ‘Reik’ or ‘reyk’ means smoke, you know, as it is in Scotch ‘reek;’ and ‘wik,’ or ‘wich,’ or ‘vik’ means a bay, as in the English ‘Woolwich,’ ‘Sandwich,’ etc, so that Reikjavik is simply ‘the bay of smoke,’ or ‘the smoking bay;’ but whether with reference to the smoke that hangs over the town, or the spray that rises mistlike from the seething billows when the wind blows, I cannot say—probably the former; and it is worthy of note, gentlemen, that some savage races far, far away from here—the aborigines of Australia, for example—designate towns by the term ‘the big smoke.’”
“How profoundly erudite you are, doctor!” says Rory. “Now, wouldn’t it have been much better for your heirs and assigns and the world at large, if you had accepted a Professorship of Antiquity in the University of Aberdeen, instead of coming away with us, to cool the toes of you at the North Pole, and maybe leave your bones to bleach beneath the Aurora Borealis, eh?”
“Ha! there I have you,” cries Sandie, smiling good-humouredly, for by this time he was quite used to Rory’s bantering ways,—“there I have you, boy Rory; and it is with the profoundest awe and respect for everything sacred, that I remind you that the Aurora Borealis never bleached any bones; and those poor unfortunates who, in their devotion for science, have wandered towards the mystery land around the Pole, and there laid down their lives, will never, never moulder into dust, but, entombed in the green, salt ice, with the virgin snow as their winding-sheet, their bodies will rest in peace, and rest intact until the trumpet sounds.”
There was a lull in the conversation at this point, but no lull in the storm; the waves dashed wildly over the ship, the wind roared through the rigging, the brave vessel quivered from stem to stern, as if in constant fear she might be hurled from the protection afforded by anchor and cable, and cast helpless upon the rock-bound shore.