This isle presents a singular contrast with the surrounding mountains, owing to the vigour of its colouring, which changes from a light-green to a dark-brown.
The mosses of different varieties, interspersed with yellowish lichens and saxifrages of a delicate violet tint, offer us a soft carpet, inviting to rest, and delighting to the eye.
Thousands of birds, making a deafening noise, inhabit this enchanted land.
But their tranquillity is disturbed by our prosaic and insatiable hunters, who give themselves up to a veritable hecatomb of game. They have scarcely got ashore, and about one hundred eider-geese are already lying on the ground. They are so numerous and so unsuspecting that they will scarcely move away more than a few yards from us; one can easily see that their solitude is rarely disturbed by visitors of our species, or at least of an equally bellicose character.
THE EXPRESS, THE ERLINE JARL, THE VIRGO, DEPARTURE OF THE VICTORIA.
They much resemble our domestic ducks, and one might easily imagine one’s self in the midst of a park or a poultry yard. At one moment I had about ten around me, come to drink or bathe in a little brook of clear water, which babbled in a cascade over the moss and pebbles.
At every step one comes across a nest made of moss and feathers, sheltered by a fragment of rock. The female bird has plucked off her softest down to protect her eggs or her brood against the frost. The brooding bird is scarcely disturbed by our approach. She covers up her eggs and hides them under the down before taking her flight, if she is given time to do so. The reports of the gun repeated again and again by the echo reverberating from the mountains resemble the rolling of thunder and make a hideous din.