The most characteristic part of Reykjavik are the suburbs of the Tómthúsmenn,[367] or empty-house men, mostly fishermen who have no farms, and consequently no cattle. We will visit the west (not West) end built between a swamp abutting upon the sea, and the normal knobbed meadow-land, where a few cows fight against starvation. It is cut by a bit of made road, and another runs east to the Laxá or Salmon River—these are the only Macadams in the island. The by-streets of our suburb become mere lanes, and the impasse is far more common than the thoroughfare. The few good houses of wood are raised upon foundations of basalt or brick laid edgeways, which keep out the damp like the piles of Fernando Po. They are entered by dwarf ladders, instead of the usual sandstone flags imported from abroad. These “magalia” will float off to sea unharmed, like Gulliver’s cage, and not break up for a long time. The empty-house men, who far outnumber all the other classes, adhere to what represents the Irish shanty, the cabin of the Far West, and the Eskimo’s earth-covered hut. The primitive fashion, preserved even in the capital, is an oblong parallelogram of basaltic blocks, alternating with peats by way of mortar—cespite pro cæmento adhibito—where tons of mussels and shell-fish[368] cumber the shore. The houses look as if shoving shoulders together against the wind, rain, and snow. The walls are sunk in the surface to the extent of a few feet, beyond which the ground is never frozen;[369] they are raised three or four feet high, with the same thickness as at the base, and battering a little inwards. One of the short ends is left open for a doorway; sometimes additional defence against wind is secured by a side-adit, a small, wooden, pent-roofed sentinel, like the office of an East Indian tent. This shell supports an acute-angled or equilateral triangle of wood: formerly birch boughs were used, now pine planks are largely imported from Denmark, as we see by the stacks scattered over the settlement. The steeply-pitched slopes, revetted with peat sods a foot square, yield a superior crop of grass—a hint of what may be done by “scalping” and draining. The gable generally shows the wood well daubed with blistering tar, which soon turns red and rusty; here are mostly two single-paned, white-framed windows, the larger one lighting the gun deck or lower floor, and the smaller the upper deck, loft or garret. The old chimney was a tub; now there is an iron tube or a square pipe of bricks: a cowl like a “fly-cray,” two bits of flat wood attached to a perpendicular, and moving with the wind, cures smoking; and where there is a weather-cock, it is the bird that warned Peter of his fall. Some of the larger establishments will have four or five of these pointed gables; and the smaller are often so small that we admire how human beings can get into them.
COTTAGE IN REYKJAVIK.
The characteristic building of the fishermen’s quarter is the Hjallr,[370] or “wind-house,” acting like the Skeo of the Scoto-Scandinavian islands; which, however, is a mere shed of dry stones. Here it is mostly an open cage of wooden uprights and stretchers, roofed over against the weather—a superior style of drying fish, especially cod. The body is either hung upon a line (hengi-fiskr or flattr-fiskr), or salted and stretched upon a rock (harðr-fiskr).[371] When dry and ready for embarking, it is heaped up on the beach and covered with stone-weighted boards. Even more unpleasant features are the vats and pits in the ground, where sharks’ livers[372] and cods’ sounds and bladders are left to form, with the addition of a little iodine, cod-liver oil. After this we cannot complain of the salting operation, done usually in some old ship’s tank.
The beach is the normal scene of a European fishing village, a chaos of anchors, old masts and spars, nets and wooden floats, clothes and waterproofs hung up to dry; blue petroleum barrels from Scotland; big piles of wrack-thatched turf, and drawn-up boats, the sails being left, whilst the rudders are taken home. We see some three carts in one place. Travellers in the early nineteenth century tell us that not even a wheelbarrow can be found at Reykjavik: now hand-carts stand in every business street, and at times a carriage drawn by two ponies, and full of people, attracts every head to the window. When the made road shall be prolonged east and west, the settlement will become civilised, as our Accra on the Gold Coast.
The rude succedaneum for the wheelbarrow, which still lingers even at Trieste, is a straight stretcher carried by two men. But the race is thoroughly unmechanical, as we might expect from its social state. A local philanthrope gave one of the peasants a small sledge, to save him from trudging under a heavy box over the deep snows; the consequence was that the box was slung to the back, whilst the sledge depended down the breast. This reminds me of S’a Leone, where a British negrophile sent sundry wheelbarrows for the benefit of the “poor black” navvies: the barrows were duly filled with earth, and hoisted upon the negro’s head, where he wisely carries everything, even his toothpick. Many of these fishermen have been sailors, and the chances are, that if the Cockney traveller chaff them with, for instance, “How did you leave the old ‘ooman?” they will straightway reply, “A’ right, s’r!” They touch their hats as strangers pass, but this patriarchal custom will soon disappear before the presence of steamers. The children clamber about the boats, and swing by cords from the masts even as Bedawin boys play upon camels’ backs; they toss up with fish tails; they chase the black cats like the denizens of Lilliput-Land; they bully the dogs, and they harness a pig on the rare occasions when one lands. “Gi’ me a skilling!” the “Gie me a yap’ny” of Wales, is sometimes heard—in fact “bakhshish” is not utterly unknown in these hyperborean lands. Yet it is only fair to confess that not a single professional beggar is to be seen at Reykjavik.
Our hunt for lodgings ended in a short and sharp run in. A young Englishman, who had spent some time here, led us ashore. After rejecting the noisy tavern, and vainly seeking shelter at the Hospital,[373] whose civil matron was once the handsomest woman in the island, we presently found cover under the roof of Frú Jonassen, sister of Geir Zoega, the guide, and married to a Dane, whose over-affection for Bacchus confines him mostly to his couch. The house deserves description: it is the normal bourgeois dwelling-place of the capital, very different from that of the country. The little box is revetted with rhubarb-coloured boarding, and covered by a black tarred board-roof. Its entrance debouches upon a hall no bigger than a bird cage, with a door to the right and the left; you must duck head as you enter them, and—never forget this precaution in Iceland. The first pièce is a bedroom some 15 feet long by 8 broad and 8 high; the single window has a half blind, but neither curtains nor shutters. Strangers complain loudly of such an unnatural thing as the broad glare of day at midnight, and indeed the effect of a horizontal sun, impinging upon the ground, is not very unlike the noon of an English November. At first, we envy those on board ship who can darken their cabins. Sound sleep is difficult under the stimulus of light which allows you to read the smallest print; presently we secure it by hanging up one of the dame’s flannel petticoats. The people, and especially the children, seem to take their rest at and till any hour: the maternal admonition “Ten o’clock, go to sleep” is here unknown; the “early to bed” of the proverb, and the doctor’s dictum about the benefits of slumber before midnight, are clean forgotten. I puzzle myself to divine how a Moslem would time his prayers in Iceland.
The bedroom contains two apple-pie-shaped box-beds, some three feet long, which startle the traveller till he sees them drawn out; they are covered with the familiar eider-down coverlet of Germany, under which you may perspire and freeze to your heart’s content: no wonder when, next to hare’s fur, it offers the greatest obstacle to heat-transmission, consequently you always kick it off. Presently we shall exchange the vile eider-down pillows and coverlet for a clean waterproof blanket, and dislodge our pests by means of the insecticide powder invented in near Dauphiné, and consequently derived by commercial humbug from distant Persia. The “B flat” at once put in an appearance, and the people accounted for it by some German musicians having lately been their lodgers: we afterwards found that the pest is not indigenous, and similarly it has been imported into the Færoe Islands from Copenhagen. The livelier animalcule is well—too well—known. The sitting-room inside is also wainscotted, and of the four shutterless windows, only half of one is made to open; they are never doubled, which shows that the cold cannot be intense; yet at times the wind must whistle through them as through a summer-house.
Each room has a stove, backed by a blackened wall, the best are the tall German cylinders, and fire is the côté faible of the capital. A little heap of peat smoulders in the kitchen behind the bedroom, and thus hot water, a prime necessary, is very scarce. The furniture consists of a central drugget, a round dinner-table, a square writing ditto, a work-table, a commode, a tall armoire, and sundry horsehair chairs, with a sofa, which must often act bed. In the rear of the kitchen is a microscopic pantry wherein it is not good to peer. Above us, a grenier occupies the sharp angle under the roof; here the family lives, and there is no sleep between 6.30 A.M. and 11 P.M.; they seem always to be clearing the decks for action. At the back of the house a yard reeks with impurities, and on both sides cages for drying fish give the well-known ancient smell. That human beings can live and enjoy health in the “stifled filth” of Damascus; of Mile-end, Old Town, or of Trieste (Città Vecchia), argues, they say, peculiar excellence of climate, and the deduction certainly applies to Reykjavik.