"You don't mean that cloud?"
"I mean that land."
"Humph!"
There is something occult about this art of seeing land. The landsman's eyesight is good; he prides himself a little upon it. He looks; and for him the land isn't there. The seaman's eyesight is no better; he looks, and for him the land is so plainly in view that he cannot understand your failure to see it. He is secretly pleased, though,—and may pretend impatience in order to conceal his pleasure. I have sailed in all, perhaps, a distance equal to that around the earth, a good proportion of it along-shore; and I see as far as most men. But once on this very voyage, during a storm, I had occasion to be convinced that nautical optics will assert their advantage. Land was pointed out; it had been some time seen, and we were avoiding it, the weather being thick and our position uncertain. I did my best to descry it, ready to quarrel with my eyes for not doing so, and a little annoyed to find myself but a landsman after all. But see it I couldn't. I did indeed, after a while, make out to fancy that I perceived an infinitesimal densening of the mist there; but the illusion was one difficult to sustain.
At four o'clock in the afternoon we cast anchor in Sleupe Harbor, named for one Admiral Sleupe, of whom I know just this, that a harbor in Labrador, Lat. 51°, is named for him. This region, however, is named generally from Little Mecatina Island, which lies about six miles to the southwest, considerable in size, and a most wild-looking land, tossed, tumbled, twisted, and contorted in every conceivable and inconceivable way. The harbor, too, a snug little hole between islands, was worthy of Labrador. Its shores were all of gray, unbroken rock, not rising in cliffs, but sloping to the sea, and dipping under it in regular decline, like a shore of sand; while not a tree, not a shrub, not a grass-blade, was to be seen. I never beheld a scene so bleak, bare, and hard. Nor did I ever see a shore that seemed so completely "master of the situation." The mightiest cliff confesses the power which it resists. Grand, enduring, awful, it may be; but many a scar on its face and many a fragment at its feet tells of what it endures. But this scarless gray rock, thrusting its hand in a matter-of-course way under the sea, and seeming to hold it as in a cup, suggested a quality so comfortably immitigable that one's eyes grew cold in looking at it.
Suddenly, "I see an inhabitant!" cries one.
Yes, there he was, moving over the rock. Can you imagine how far away and foreign he looked? The gray granite beneath him, the gray cloud above him, seemed nearer akin. Instinctively, one thought of hastening to a book of natural history for some description of the creature. Then came the counter-thought, "This is a man!" And the attempt to realize that fact put him yet farther, put him infinitely away. It was like rebounding from a wall. No form is so foreign as the human, if a bar be placed to the sympathy of him who regards it; and for the time this waif of humanity walked in the circle of an unconquerable strangeness.
He came on board,—another with him; for their hut was near by. Canadian French they proved to be; could tatter English a little; and with the passage of speech the flow of sympathy began, and we felt them to be human. Through the Word the worlds were made!
A wilderness of desert islands lies at this point along the coast, extending out, I judged, not less than fifteen miles. Excepting Little Mecatina, which is a number of miles in length, and must be some fifteen hundred feet high, they are not very considerable either in area or elevation,—from five to five hundred acres in extent, and from thirty to two hundred feet in height. They are swardless and treeless, though in two places I found a few blades of coarse, tawny-green grass; and patches of sombre shrubbery, two and a half feet high, were not wanting. Little lichen grows on the rock, though in the depressions and on many of the slopes grows, or at least exists, a boggy greenish-gray moss, over which it breaks your knees—if, indeed, your spine do not choose to monopolize that enjoyment—to travel long. The rock is pale granite, disposed in layers, which vary from two to ten or twelve feet in thickness. These incline at an angle of from ten to twenty degrees, giving to the islands, as a predominant characteristic, a regular slope on one side and a cliff-like aspect on the other; though not a few are bent up in the middle, perhaps exhibiting there some sharp ridge or vertical wall, while from this they decline to either side.
As beheld on the day of our arrival, this scenery was of an incomparable desolation. Above was the coldest gray sky I remember to have seen; the sea lay all in pallid, deathly gray beneath; islands in all shades of grimmer and grimmest gray checkered it; vast drifts of gray old snow filled the deeper hollows; and a heartless atmosphere pushed in the sense of this grayness to the very marrow. It was as if all the ruddy and verdurous juices had died in the veins of the world, and from core to surface only gray remained. To credit fully the impression of the scene, one would say that Existence was dead, and that we stood looking on its corpse, which even in death could never decay. Eternal Desolation,—Labrador!