Three Travellers in the Shetland Islands
rilHE ` Earl of Zetland ' waited with aristocratic calm to be loaded and dispatched. There is no fixed time for the departure of the boat which plies between Lerwick and the Shetland Islands ; or rather a time is fixed, but it is taken seriously by no one. The ' Earl ' just arrives, and st rams into little landlocked harbours with a restrained and dignified hooting. At the first sound of a hoot there are cries of ' The Earl ! ' ' The Earl ! ' and a leisured activity begins.
Boats with sails like faded brown velvet, descendants in shape of the Norse galleys, put out piled with boxes and passengers, and return shorewards with other passengers and sacks of meal. The " flit boats," as they are called, are sailed with extreme skill, and they sidle alongside ` The Earl,' who waits for their coming and departure with the air of one to whom time means nothing. The three travellers (whom, for convenience, we will name A., L., and M.) come of a more impatient race than those island dwellers, and would not have been sorry to reach their destination a little sooner. But M. was lent by the captain a long bamboo rod adorned at intervals with old tooth brushes, and told to fish. He managed to catch some unwary " piltocks," and for him time did not exist.
Unst, the island on which we landed, is the most northerly of the Shetlands, and the air blows pure and fresh from Greenland. In fact, a wind blows always. If it stops for a moment, the inhabitants of Unst ask each other what has happened. There are no trees, but the enterprising and industrious can make flowers grow, protected by walls, and the houses are extremely solid and neat, built in grey stone, of nearly unvarying design.
Amongst the things you recapture in Shetland is the oid Scottish Sabbath. The Minister has the satisfaction on Sunday morning of seeing groups of quiet, soberly dressed people coming over the hills and all converging on thelittle church. Rain or shine, the congregation come, one family in an open boat from the island where they live, and all listen with complete gravity and attention to every word. Looking at their intent faces you see a real longing for spiritual food which wind and weather cannot quench.
Time flies in Shetland. There is so much to see and to do. One day when the rain poured and the wind blew, we took the local Ford and drove over the hills to Baltasound. Baltasound at one time was the centre of the fish-curing industry, but the trawlers have taken away much of its work, and a great many of the colony of wooden huts have an unused, derelict appearance. There was a decided touch of Greenland in the wind which blew round us, and we left the Ford, looking as bleak as only an elderly Ford can look, with reluctance. We gazed into the principal shop window and, stirred by the lure of shopping, we were about to go inside, but two notices on the door—to the effect that eyes could be tested and tombstones lettered between two specified dates—had a vaguely deterrent effect upon us. We went instead to see some marvels of Shetland knitting, in bright delicate colours, and in every imaginable shade of fawn and brown. The Shetland women have a sort of sixth sense where knitting is concerned, and seem, practically untaught, to be able to produce a shawl a spider might well envy with all the beauty of a cobweb but without its impermanence. Unst is celebrated especially for shawls, but seems equally well able to produce the so-called Fair Isle patterns. There is something, too, in the Shetland light and background which gives all human beings and animals the qualities of an Egyptian frieze—pattern-lib' —as they move slowly along. All animal life is delight- fully miniature. Groups of Shetland ponies wander everywhere, close to the houses and away over the hills, some looking like walking doormats with theix winter coats falling off them. The little collies are graceful and timidly friendly, and the sheep have a charming habit of wandering about in threes, one white, one brown, and one black.
To return, however, to our travellers—they were taken to Burra Firth, a flat plain of grass bounded on each side by green hills. At the mouth of the bay, stately red cliffs rise up, showing a gleam of sea which, unbroken by land, stretches to the Arctic Circle. A burn runs into the sea, where you can get brown trout, or you can wade into the sea for sea trout, warding off the piltocks and flounders which rush at your fly. H. lost a large sea trout, and stood sadly looking out to sea ; but he brightened on observing some very ragged little boys sailing a graceful schooner from the burn into the sea. " It would have cost 15 at Gamage's," he whispered. The building of model boats is one of the things at which Unst excels.
The travellers went to Hermaness to visit the bird watcher in his hut. Those who have been much in Scotland must be aware of the sea gulls sitting familiarly in fields beside the cows and sheep ; but Shetland seems at all times a land possessed by birds. In the hospitable house where the travellers stayed, two gulls sat like heraldic birds on two chimneys awaiting the scraps from the kitchen. They tried their powers of intimidation on the cat, fluttering over her with open beaks, but beyond grimacing horribly at them she seemed com- pletely unmoved. At Hermaness skuas and black-backed gulls screamed close to us and all round us, opening large beaks and revealing red throats. The bird watcher's but looks like a Noah's Ark. The watcher is as shaggy and dark as the house is white and spruce. He has watched for thirty-six years on Hermaness, to see that no one takes eggs in the nesting season, and the skuas have risen from five pairs to some thousands in consequence of his care. His only com7 panion is a little yellow dog, whose heart is bound with triple brass, for he does not mind the gulls who fly- round him, and even try to assault him in the nesting season. The watcher was slightly bored by questions about rare birds, migrants, and such-like. Under a battery of questions from M. as to the names of the small birds flying "about in and out among the gulls he confessed to knowing only one, the " mossa. poppet." A. interpreted this as a moss or rock pipit ; but whether this explanation is correct or not, no one knows. The watcher took them to the edge of some great cliffs to give them a glimpse of the most northerly lighthouse of the British Isles, Muckle Flugga, at the end of -a rock, on whose razor edge gannets sat in rows.
It was with great regret that we left that part of the British Islands, which is not Norway nor Scotland, and certainly not England. The Shetlanders are deseended from the Norse and talk English unlike the Highlanders, and with a slight hesitation as of a foreign tongue. They speak of Scotland with detachment, and have been known to say she sends them only bad meal and bad ministers ! But farewells had to be said, the big flat-bottomed boat- put -out, and we waved good- bye at last to the post office loch and the hills and ponies. `The Earl ' took her leisurely way through the islands, past rocks where, as M. expressed it, the seals put up their " shiny mackintosh faces," to Lerwick where we took ship for Aberdeen.
And now, though mountains divide them from these island places and a waste of seas, our travellers say they must- go back to Shetland some day, L.
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