Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI.

A GUIDE FOUND TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH

In the evening I took a short walk on the beach and returned at nightto my plank-bed, where I slept soundly all night.

When I awoke I heard my uncle talking at a great rate in the nextroom. I immediately dressed and joined him.

He was conversing in the Danish language with a tall man, of robustbuild. This fine fellow must have been possessed of great strength.His eyes, set in a large and ingenuous face, seemed to me veryintelligent; they were of a dreamy sea-blue. Long hair, which wouldhave been called red even in England, fell in long meshes upon hisbroad shoulders. The movements of this native were lithe and supple;but he made little use of his arms in speaking, like a man who knewnothing or cared nothing about the language of gestures. His wholeappearance bespoke perfect calmness and self-possession, notindolence but tranquillity. It was felt at once that he would bebeholden to nobody, that he worked for his own convenience, and thatnothing in this world could astonish or disturb his philosophiccalmness.

I caught the shades of this Icelander's character by the way in whichhe listened to the impassioned flow of words which fell from theProfessor. He stood with arms crossed, perfectly unmoved by myuncle's incessant gesticulations. A negative was expressed by a slowmovement of the head from left to right, an affirmative by a slightbend, so slight that his long hair scarcely moved. He carried economyof motion even to parsimony.

Certainly I should never have dreamt in looking at this man that hewas a hunter; he did not look likely to frighten his game, nor did heseem as if he would even get near it. But the mystery was explainedwhen M. Fridrikssen informed me that this tranquil personage was onlya hunter of the eider duck, whose under plumage constitutes the chiefwealth of the island. This is the celebrated eider down, and itrequires no great rapidity of movement to get it.

Early in summer the female, a very pretty bird, goes to build hernest among the rocks of the fiords with which the coast is fringed.After building the nest she feathers it with down plucked from herown breast. Immediately the hunter, or rather the trader, comes androbs the nest, and the female recommences her work. This goes on aslong as she has any down left. When she has stripped herself bare themale takes his turn to pluck himself. But as the coarse and hardplumage of the male has no commercial value, the hunter does not takethe trouble to rob the nest of this; the female therefore lays hereggs in the spoils of her mate, the young are hatched, and next yearthe harvest begins again.

Now, as the eider duck does not select steep cliffs for her nest, butrather the smooth terraced rocks which slope to the sea, theIcelandic hunter might exercise his calling without any inconvenientexertion. He was a farmer who was not obliged either to sow or