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The sweet-scented geranium abounded and so did the crowberry, which is a finer and sweeter kind than that which grows nearer the settlement. We frequently stopped to refresh ourselves with it. Near a gulch we sat down for a good rest, and then trudged on to Seal Bay. The scenery was fine, high mountains with long, grassy slopes.
There was thick brushwood of phylica, of fern and crowberry all round, and, tired as we were, I felt we could not make our way through this. Graham and William went in search of water and soon procured some. We had for luncheon captain's biscuits and chocolate, eaten under a scorching sun.
The first mile from the edge of the base was fairly flat, but over spongy ground thickly studded with stout ferns which came up above our knees. Then we got on to a grassy slope, and from that descended into a gulch, up which we went for about a mile. Getting out of this we next trudged over grassy slopes on which were growing fine specimens of the crowberry.
A short walk through the long moss a-glitter with wild flowers, poppies, harebells, monkshood, and a host of sub-Arctic species, brought the lad to the top of the hill. There he paused a moment, to look over the island, treeless save for dwarf willows six inches high and a ground-dwelling form of crowberry.
The pleasure lies not in the prize itself, but in the pains which it has cost; in the upward climbs through the dark plantations, beside the rock-walled stream; the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay flower-bed of blue and purple butter-wort; the steady breathless climb up the crags, which looked but one mile from you when you started, so clear against the sky stood out every knoll and slab; the first stars of the white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropt, as if a fairy had pricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon some green cushion of wet moss, in a dripping crack of the cliff; the first grey tufts of the Alpine club-moss, the first shrub of crowberry, or sea-green rose-root, with its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the two-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning of the Alpine world; the scramble over the arid waves of the porphyry sea aloft, as you beat round and round like a weary pointer dog in search of the hidden lake; the last despairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramid on Moel Meirch; the hasty gaze around, far away into the green vale of Ffestiniog, and over wooded flats, and long silver river-reaches, and yellow sands, and blue sea flecked with flying clouds, and isles and capes, and wildernesses of mountain peaks, east, west, south, and north; one glance at the purple gulf out of which Snowdon rises, thence only seen in full majesty from base to peak: and then the joyful run, springing over bank and boulder, to the sad tarn beneath your feet: the loosening of the limbs, as you toss yourself, bathed in perspiration, on the turf; the almost awed pause as you recollect that you are alone on the mountain-tops, by the side of the desolate pool, out of all hope of speech or help of man; and, if you break your leg among those rocks, may lie there till the ravens pick your bones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from Amboyna or Brazil may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those Syenite cubes which will twist your ankles and break your shins for the next three hours.
The most luxuriant of the islands boasted only a patch of crowberry bushes or a few creeping junipers too much abashed to lift their heads a finger's length above the earth. Alwin looked about him with a sigh, and then at Sigurd with a grimace. "Do you still say that this is pleasanter than drowning?" he inquired. Sigurd met the fling with obstinate composure.
The air that fanned the village which we left at noon, was mild and cheering; the grass was verdant, and the wild fruits ripe around it. But here the snow was not yet dissolved, the ground was still bound by the frost, the herbage had scarce begun to spring, and the crowberry bushes were just beginning to blossom."
The cranberry, the crowberry, the cloudberry, etc., produce fruit any one of which might outweigh the herb itself. Nowhere does one get the impression that these are weeds, as often happens among the rank growths farther south. The flowers in the wildest profusion are generally low, always delicate and mostly in beds of a single species.
It was done delightfully simple; little bunches of geraniums, roses and green being hung from the beams and the walls. Nearly all were present in the morning, the women having got up early to prepare their dinners. Rebekah said she was up at 4.30. Our dinner was provided for us, the Greens sending stuffed sucking-pig and others crowberry open tarts. Alas! we had no plum-pudding.
Then come crowberry, and two species of huckleberry, one of them from about six inches to a foot high with delicious berries, the other a most lavishly prolific and contented-looking dwarf, few of the bushes being more than two inches high, counting to the topmost leaf, yet each bearing from ten to twenty or more large berries.
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