She rose, took up her basket, and ran down a steep path, along a fir-grove. In a loud voice she sang a Mission hymn:
Tout brillant d'une ardeur immortelle,
C'est vers Dieu que tendent mes désirs[460].
She scattered to flight, as she went, those pretty birds called egrets, from the tuft on their heads; she looked as though she were one of their number. When she reached the sea, she leapt into a boat, unfurled the sail, and seated herself at the rudder; one might have taken her for Fortune; she sailed away from me.
"Oh yes; oh no; Guillaumy:" the picture of the young sailor seated on a yard among the winds changed the hideous rock of Saint-Pierre into a land of delights:
L'isole di Fortuna, ora vedete[461].
We spent a fortnight in the island. From its desolate shores one discerns the yet more desolate coasts of Newfoundland. The hills in the interior put out diverging chains of which the highest extends towards Rodriguez Creek. In the dales, the granite rock, mixed with red and green mica, is covered with a thick cushion of sphagnum, lichens, and dicranum.
Small lakes are nourished by the tribute brought by the streams from the Vigie, or Look-Out; the Courval; the Pain-de-Sucre, or Sugarloaf; the Kergariou; the Tête-Galante, or Gallant Head. These pools are known by the names of the Étangs-du-Savoyard, or Savoyard's Ponds; the Cap-Noir, or Black Head; the Ravenel; the Colombier, or Dove-cot; the Cap-à-l'Aigle, or Eagle Head. When the whirlwinds strike upon these pools, they rend the shallow waters, laying bare, in places, portions of submarine meadows, which are as suddenly covered over by the newly-woven veil of the waters.
The flora of Saint-Pierre is the same as that of Lapland and Magellan's Straits. The number of plants diminishes as one proceeds towards the Pole; in Spitzbergen we find only forty species of phanerogamous plants. In changing their habitation, races of plants become extinct: some which dwell in the frozen steppes in the North become daughters of the mountain in the South; others which thrive in the peaceful atmosphere of the thickest forests decrease in strength and size until at last they expire on the stormy strands of the ocean. At Saint-Pierre, the marsh myrtle (vaccinium fugilinosum) is reduced to the condition of creeping grasses; it will soon be buried in the wadding and cushions of the mosses which serve as its soil. Myself a passenger plant, I have taken my precautions to disappear by the sea-shore, the site of my birth.
The slope of the hillocks of Saint-Pierre is laid over with balsam-trees, medlars, dwarf palms, larches, black firs, the gems of which are used for brewing an antiscorbutic beer. These trees do not exceed a man's stature. The ocean wind pollards them, shakes them, bends them like so many ferns; then, gliding beneath these forests of shrubs, it raises them again; but it finds no trunks there, nor branches, nor arches, nor echoes to wail among, and it makes no more noise than on a heath.