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The St Kildans enjoy a plentiful supply of good water: how good I will leave poor old Martin to tell, for, although I am a teetotaler, he drank far more than I either could or would. He says: "Of the well of Qualities or Virtues I drank twice, an English quart each time."
I do not think there can be any question as to the nobility of a man's thirst who can swallow so much cold water, of whatsoever quality, at a single draught, and this singular feat half inclines me to believe in our author's theory, dealt with earlier in this chapter, anent the declining capacities and endurance of the human race, for "the present generation comes short," certainly, of his in its thirst for cold water. He further adds that "the inhabitants of Harris find it (the water of the well of Qualities) effectual against windy colics, gravel, and headaches"; but, being troubled with none of these disorders during my stay close to it, I had no opportunity of putting its efficacy to the test. The inhabitants of this remote rock are, aquatically speaking, still further blessed; for, according to the same enthusiastic authority, there is another fountain on the island, the water from which "will wash linen without soap as well as other water will with it."
Some idea of the roughness of the sea in these parts during a westerly gale, coming straight from the bosom of the Atlantic, may be gathered from the fact that waves have been known upon occasion to leap over a part of the Doon, three hundred feet in height, and pour down the slope into Village Bay in great green and white cataracts.
Martin noticed that in hauling their boats up the rocks out of the sea the natives employed "a cryer, on purpose to warn all at the same minute, and he ceases whenever he finds it convenient to give them a breathing." Exactly the same practice holds good today; and so long have the people hauled their boats up in one particular spot that the rock is grooved by the grinding of innumerable keel-plates.
In that chronicler's time there were about eighteen horses on the island, but now there is not a single one.
Two hundred years ago the St Kildans took care to keep their graveyard "perfectly free and void of any kind of nastiness"; but now, alas, it is neglected and overgrown with nettles and other noxious weeds, from the midst of which I saw a single headstone peeping, grey and gaunt, like a weird sentinel over the sleeping dead, who are, after all, in such an utterly out-of-the-world place, only a little more asleep than the poor creatures who linger round them still able to hear the boom of the sea breaking upon the rocks at their feet.
Ankle development
One of the first things that struck me as peculiar about the St Kildans was the abnormal size of their ankle joints and the thickness of their insteps. So much was I impressed with this specialised development - brought about, no doubt, by long generations of rock and steep-hill climbing - that I had the foot of a man, corresponding as nearly as possible in point of size and weight with myself, photographed side by side with my own in order to show the difference.
Cleit for storing fuel or hay
From Martin's time down to quite recently, according to the testimony of various writers, the fair-complexioned members of the community appear to have been in the majority, but the dark ones now have the ascendancy in point of numbers.
Their fuel consists of turf stripped from the hill sides, and stored in the numerous cleits which are dotted about all over the place like mere heaps of stones carelessly thrown together and surmounted by a few sods. The entrance to nearly all these curious structures is barred by half-a-dozen stones roughly piled one upon another, but some of the largest and best have wooden doors to them, as shown in our illustration. The object propping the door up is the jawbone of a whale, probably belonging to a dead leviathan which was seen floating past in 1886 and towed into Village Bay, where it melted so fast in the hot sun that the St Kildans secured only 150 gallons of its oil. These cleits, which have been estimated to number no less than five thousand individual buildings, are of very simple construction, consisting of two parallel side-walls three or four feet apart and four or five feet in height, with rough lintel stones across the top, on which is piled a quantity of turf so sloped as to keep out the rain. The wind rushes through the side-walls at a furious rate - as I can testify, having spent a night in one - and dries whatever is placed in them.
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