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Updated: June 14, 2025
In addition to the standing population of Thorshavn, the fortifications an abandoned mud-bank, a flag-staff, and a board shanty are subject, in times of great public peril, to be defended by a standing army and navy of twenty-four soldiers, one small boat, one corporal, and the governor of the islands, who takes the field himself at the head of this bloody phalanx of Danes still reeking with the gore of slaughtered fish.
A shell had smashed into the platoon next door. There was a nasty mess. Men sat under their own mud-bank and scooped out a tin of bully beef and hoped nothing would scoop them out of their bit of earth. This protective egotism seemed to me the instinctive soul-armor of men in dangerous places when I saw them in the line.
There were enemies near it and round it in all directions. There were leopards and serpents of the largest size in the woods, and man upon the river although on this occasion it chanced that most of the men who gazed in admiration at its pretty form were friends. But its worst enemy, a crocodile, was lurking close under the mud-bank at its feet.
In attacks of this nature the fact that the tender was afloat told heavily in her favour, for unless temporarily hung up upon a mud-bank by the fall of the tide, she could only be got at by means of boats. With the rendezvous ashore the case was altogether different.
Then, as now, all this material, borne upon the rivers, washed to and fro by the ocean, settled down at the mouths of rivers or at the bottom of the sea, into a sediment, one layer forming over another, gradually built up through long ages. At first it was only a soft, loose, sandy or muddy sediment, such as you may see on the seashore, or in a mud-bank.
Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself. Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mud-banks no, it is beyond me. Language may be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind.
I heard them talking in bird-language, saw them paddling with diminutive gravity up and down in the mud, on the island mud-bank just beneath the high place on which my tent was pitched. When I grew lonesome for company, human company, I swam ashore, my clothes tied on top of my head to keep them dry, and, dressing, walked into Laurel.
The very first thing they saw upon entering it was an enormous alligator, fully eighteen feet long, sound asleep on a mud-bank. "Och! put ashore, ye Naygur," cried Barney, seizing his pistol and rising up in the bow of the canoe. The old man complied quickly, for his spirit was high and easily roused.
Had it come from the right quarter Paul believed it might have helped work them loose; but it happened unfortunately that just the reverse was the case. If anything, they were driven on the mud-bank all the harder. But at any rate the tarpaulin canopy did not break loose, and that was something to be satisfied with. The wind whooped and howled for perhaps three minutes.
The next moment I was quite paralysed by the surprise I felt, for there, not twenty feet away from the spot where I lay, was a monstrous alligator, evidently fast asleep on a glistening mud-bank, his trail from the water being distinctly marked in the soft mud. There were the prints of his paws, and of his long tapering tail, and I could do nothing but gaze at his great proportions.
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