(Un the "Christian Sctence Monttor")
A week of leaden seas, smeared with fog, spotted with bergs, sometimes brightened but never warmed by a hard Labrador sun, and now land at last. It blurs out of the thinning mist into a black wall of cliff and splintered fissure and bald headland, seamed with snow, treeless, repellent Only a week in time and 500 leagues in space, and I am in a new world, with only the warm cabins and friendly companions of the Nascopie to remind me of the old world of forest and farm land, gay shops and busy streets "down under." None of these things here among the iron hills—not a friendly campfire on the moss-gray barrens behind, not a moccasin trail or a hunter's cache— only the clawing fingers of the Arctic surf at their base and the Arctic winds keening above their heads.
Gulls and guillemonts are screaming round the prow; hair seals and white whales rise from the black depths of the sea, and hidden at far intervals among the coast crevices, one knows, there is humanity—families of little brown people and ever. a white man or two, servitors of company and church and crown, and dependent for sustenance on the supplies beneath our decks.
I lift my glasses and discover a dot, appearing and disappearing between the waves. The iron mountains are rising and closing in around us, the steamer is losing headway, but as yet there is no sign of habitation or place for one.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.