“No; they rarely appear on the surface of the water, and this fellow would not have done so if one of your trawl-hooks had not caught him. He belongs to the same family as the little squid we catch in such quantities on the Banks for cod bait.”
“I’d hate to have to catch such a fellow as he was for bait,” said Breeze, with a shudder.
“He’d make good whale bait,” replied the skipper. “There’s nothing the sperm-whale likes better. I once saw a piece of the arm of a cuttle-fish, thirty feet long, taken from a dead whale’s mouth, and we calculated that the creature to which it had belonged must have measured one hundred and twenty feet from tip to tip.”
“I thought a whale’s throat was too small to swallow a thing like that,” said Breeze.
“Not the throat of a sperm-whale. That is large enough to swallow ’most anything. You are thinking of the right whale. He couldn’t swallow a mackerel, his throat is so small.”
One afternoon, ten days after this incident, by which time the crew of the Fish-hawk were heartily tired of the cold, stormy weather of the North Atlantic, the cry of “Land, ho!” rang through the schooner. The western sun, breaking through a bank of clouds, shone clear and full upon a distant snow-covered mountain-top. The ocean had been crossed, and Iceland was in sight.
CHAPTER XX.
ON THE COAST OF ICELAND.
This first glimpse of the great northern island so fascinated Breeze that he could not take his eyes off the distant spot of glistening whiteness. It seemed too wonderful to be true, that he, a poor fisher-lad, should be about to visit the mysterious land of fire and snow that the majority of travellers consider to be far beyond their limit of time and money. He thought over all that he knew or had ever heard of Iceland, and found that it was very little indeed. He knew that it was an island, that it contained icy glaciers, smoking volcanoes, vast deserts of broken lava, and was noted for its geysers, though he had no clear idea of what a geyser was or even looked like. He had heard that Mount Hecla was the principal volcano of the island, and he wondered if the distant white object at which he was gazing might not be it. This was about all that Breeze could remember concerning this wonderful country, and I do not believe that many of the readers of this story know any more about it than he did. Do you?
THE FIRST VIEW OF ICELAND.