Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/251

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HERE are many islands on that broken coast, and one small one called Blaamandso, a place of barely a hundred souls. But the next one to it is far bigger; three or even four hundred people there might be, with some sort of official. And a church there is too, by reason of which they call it Kirkeoen. Since I was a child there's come a post office there, and the telegraph as well.

Among these island folk 'tis always reckoned a finer thing to be from the big island; even those from the mainland were not reckoned for much by folk from Kirkeoen, though they came from the biggest place of all. They are fisherfolk all, for miles round.

All the Atlantic washes the shores of Blaamandso, so far to sea it lies. And every face of it sheer cliff, unscalable on three sides; only the south, towards the sun at noon, is a track where God and man have made a passable way up over the rock; a stairway of two hundred steps. After every storm at sea a mass of timber, planks, and wreckage comes in from the sea, and of this driftwood the boat-builders make their craft. They carry the planks up those two hundred steps, build the boats there in among their huts, to wait till winter comes, and the northward cliffs are blue with the smooth-polished ice; then, with pulley and rope, they send the boats down over that glassy scarp and launch them so. I saw it done myself when I was a child; two men stood up on the cliff above, paying out the rope, while one sat in the boat, fending it off wherever it threatened to catch. 'Twas a work of courage and care,