Now we could see the beach and the white ranks of breakers which lay between us and it.  Bertric looked long as we neared the first line of them, and counted them, and his face brightened.

“Look at the beach,” he said to me.  “It is high water, and spring tide, moreover.  There will be water enough for our light draught.  Get Gerda forward, for the sea will break over the stern the moment we touch the ground.”

I looked at him, and he nodded and smiled.

“It will be nothing,” he said, knowing what I meant.  “One is sheltered here under this high stern.  I shall take no harm.  Nay, I am ship master, and I bid you care for the lady.  There are no signs of rocks.”

For I hesitated, not altogether liking not to stand by him at the last.  However, he was right, and I went forward with Gerda, bidding Dalfin get one of the oars and follow us.

Now, what that beach may have been like in a winter gale I can only guess.  Even now the breakers were terrible enough, as we watched them from the high bows, though the wind was, as I have said, not what one would trouble about much in the open sea, in a well-found ship.  But naught save dire necessity would make a seaman try to beach his ship here at any time, least of all when half a gale was piling the seas one over the other across the shallows.  Only, we could see that no jagged reef waited us under the surges.

Gerda stood with her arm round the dragon head which stared forward.  I minded at that moment how I had ever heard that one should unship the dragon as the shore was neared, lest the gentle spirits of the land, the Landvaettnir, should be feared.  But that was too late now, and I do not think that I should have troubled concerning it in any wise, on a foreign coast.  The thought came and went from me, but I set Gerda’s cloak round her loosely, so that if need was it would fall from her at once; and I belted my mail close, and tried to think how I might save her, if we must take to the water perforce.  I could swim in the mail well enough, and she could swim also.  There might be a chance for her.  I feared more for Dalfin.

Now we flew down on the first line of breakers, lifted on the crest, half blinded with the foam, and plunged across it.  I held my breath as the bows swooped downward into the hollow of the wave, fearing to feel the crash of the ship’s striking, but she lifted again to the next roller, while the white foam covered the decks as the broken gunwale aft lurched amid it.  So we passed four great surges safely, and we were not an arrow flight from land.  The water was deep enough for us so far.  Then we rose on the back of the fifth roller, and it set us far before we overtook its crest and passed it.  The sharp bows leapt through the broken water into the air, and hung for a long moment over the hollow, until the stern lifted and they were flung forward and downward.  Then came a sharp grating and a little shock, gone almost as it was felt, but it told of worse to come, maybe.  We had felt the ground.