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If any thing in England seem to excite their wonder and ill-placed compassion, it is our coal fires, which they persist in thinking strangely unwholesome and a melancholy proof that we are grievously devoid of wood, before we can prevail upon ourselves to dig the bowels of old earth for fewel, at the hazard of our precious health, if not of its certain loss; nor could I convince the wisest man I tried at, that wood burned to chark is a real poison, while it would be difficult by any process of chemistry to force much evil out of coal.
But I soon found the way to burn wood with turf at the top of it, which made it like chark, or dry coal; and this I could use by day, as it had no smoke. I found in the wood where I went to get the sticks for my fire, a cave so large that I could stand in it; but I made more haste to get out, than in; for two large eyes, as bright as stars, shone out from it with a fierce glare.
Sir Thomas Middleton of Chark Castle, enemy to Presbytery, seeing they much prevailed, being a member of the House, seriously demanded my judgment, if Presbytery should prevail, or not, in England? The figure printed in my Introduction, will best give you an account, long before it happened, of the sinking and failing of Presbytery; so will the second page of my Hieroglyphicks.
They first wound a couple of cords around a pointed stick in such a way that the unwinding of the one would wind up the other, and then, placing the point of the stick against a circular disk of wood, twirled it rapidly by alternate pulls on the two strings. This instrument is called a chark, and is still used in South Africa, in Australia, in Sumatra, and among the Veddahs of Ceylon.
Kelly rightly identifies Frodi with the sun-god Fro or Freyr, and observes that the magic mill is only another form of the fire-churn, or chark. According to another version the quern is still grinding away and keeping the sea salt, and over the place where it lies there is a prodigious whirlpool or maelstrom which sucks down ships.
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