FLOKI OF THE RAVENS. 
29 
The mountain we had seen in the morning was the 
south-east extremity of the island, the very landfall 
made by one of its first discoverers. 1 This gentleman 
not having a compass, (he lived about A. D. 864,) nor 
knowing exactly where the land lay, took on board with 
him, at starting, three consecrated ravens—as an M.P. 
would take three well-trained pointers to his moor. 
Having sailed a certain distance, he let loose one, which 
flew back,—by this he judged he had not got halfway. 
Proceeding onwards, he loosed the second, which, after 
circling in the air for some minutes in apparent uncer¬ 
tainty, also made off home, as though it still remained 
a nice point which were the shorter course toward terra 
1 There is in Strabo an account of a voyage made by a citizen 
of the Greek colony of Marseilles, in the time of Alexander the 
Great, through the Pillars of Hercules, along the coasts of France 
and Spain, up the English Channel, and so across the North Sea, 
past an island he calls Thule ; his further progress, he asserted, was 
hindered by a barrier of a peculiar nature,—neither earth, ah, nor 
sky, but a compound of all three, forming a thick viscid substance 
which it was impossible to penetrate. Now, whether this same 
Thule was one of the Shetland Islands, and the impassable substance 
merely a fog,—or Iceland, and the barricade beyond, a wall of ice, 
it is impossible to say. Probably Pythias did not get beyond the 
Shetlands. 
