Round a table on the broad piazza of the hotel, in an angle where we looked straight through the eyelet of the rocks to the sleeping ocean, a gold-backed monster like a leviathan covering the earth, slumberously heaving in the sun, I was sitting with three companions.
There was my best friend, Antoine Goritz, a man thickly bearded, with a broad, unwrinkled brow sparingly topped by light wisps of straggling hair, with a straight Teutonic nose, deep-set blue eyes under carven ivory lids, beneath eyebrows deeper tinted than his hair, and with a physical frame, strong, massive, large, effective, perhaps a trifle overdrawn in its suggestion of muscular power.
It was a titan mould, but the face above it was humorously still and observant. I often compared him to Sverdrup, Nansen’s captain, but he was a bigger man. Like him he possessed the docility of a child, the energy of a giant. Slow of speech ordinarily, as he was slow of movement, but in stress and excitement convulsed with his rapid, headlong utterance, and rising to a momentum of action that was irresistible and swift. He sat upright in a thick brown plaid with a blue sailor’s scarf around his broad neck and a straw hat like a coracle on his head.
Next to him sat Professor Hlmath Bjornsen, a very tidy man of ordinary build and stature, but oddly distinguishable by his abundant red hair, the crab-like protuberance of his eyes (he wore no glasses), his indented lips, which looked as if stitched up in sections, also undisguised by any covering of hair, his patulous, projecting ears. His homeliness was saved by the merit of cheerfulness at least, by a pug nose, a rosy complexion and a demure, winning sort of smile that was generally a propos of nothing, but was retained habitually as nature’s protective grace against the premature prejudices of first acquaintances. Professor Bjornsen was a man learned in rocks, minerals, mines, geology, the hard and motionless properties of the earth. He was scrupulously neat, and his frequent inspection of himself, especially his hands, was equally disconcerting and amusing.
Spruce Hopkins was the next man, alongside of myself, and probably he would have been the first man whom an approaching stranger would have looked at the longest, and concerned himself with knowing the most. He was a Yankee, an American of Americans, but of that Grecian phase which rejects toto-coelo, the newspaper type, the Brother Jonathan caricature, the cheap idiosyncracies of the paragraph writer, unassimilable even with the more credible picture,
of one who wisely schemed
And hostage from the future took,
In trained thought and lore of book.
Large-brained, clear-eyed—of such as he
Shall Freedom’s young apostles be.