Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/83

Rh Norsemen who had crossed the Atlantic and lived on that arctic edge of the new world half a millennium before Columbus sailed his ships from Spain.

Geoff and Doctor Koehler and one or two of the sailors from the ship were there ahead of them, moving about among the ruins. The stone walls of the old viking houses still stood and the foundations of the churches—the churches which in the eleventh century sent across the sea of darkness walrus ivory as tithes to Rome. The ancient byres and pens for the cattle and sheep and horses lay traced upon the ground beside the ruins of the barns, drying houses and larders. There had lived in that district something over one thousand people. Behind, the mountains rose bleak, bare, cheerless; in front was the sea, green and white, blotched with great icebergs drifting by. From the high hillside they could see the ships down in the fiord.

Geoff came up close beside his sister. "How many ships these stones have seen go by to the north," he said, caught for a moment by the drama of the spot.