雙語+MP3|美國學(xué)生世界地理39 偉大的丹麥人

     WHEN anything annoyed my uncle he used to cry out, "Skagerrack and Kattegat!" It sounded terrible, for I didn't know then that Skagerrack and Kattegat were merely the names of the narrow waterway around Denmark from the North Sea into the Baltic Sea and that Kattegat simply meant "the cat's throat" and Skagerrack meant "Skager throat."
     There are two chief pieces to Denmark. One piece is the thumb-like land called Jutland, because a people called the Jutes used to live there. The other piece is a little island right alongside of Jutland called Zealand. You don't have to be a good guesser to know that Zealand means "Sea Land." On this island is Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. Copenhagen means "Merchants' Harbor," because merchants with their ships used to stop there on the way from the North Sea to the Baltic. But there are not as many ships now as there used to be, for instead of going through the Skagerrack and Kattegat, many ships take the short cut through the Kiel Canal. Copenhagen is the only big city that Denmark has-there are no other large cities.
     You probably have heard of a "Great Dane," a kind of big dog that comes from Denmark. But the people in Denmark are called Danes, and there is one great Dane whom you probably know and whose stories you have probably read. He wrote "The Little Match Girl" and "The Ugly Duckling." The man who wrote those fairy-tales lived in Copenhagen. His name is Hans Christian Andersen. The Danes like the name "Christian." Ten of their kings have been named Christian.
     But over a thousand years ago the Danes were not Christians, and many were pirates who sailed the seas and robbed other lands. They are now, of course, no longer pirates; but they are still great sailors. In some towns almost every person is either a sailor, a ship-builder, or connected with shipping in some way.
     The Danes who stay at home are chiefly engaged in the butter and egg business. They raise cows to make butter and chickens to lay eggs and they send butter and eggs to other countries that haven't enough. Danish eggs have the date when they are laid stamped on them, so that every one may know how fresh or how old they are. Danish butter is so good and brings such high prices that the Danes send most of it away, and they themselves usually eat an imitation butter made out of fat or grease.
     Denmark is one of the healthiest countries in the World. People live longer there than in almost any other country; so the moral of this is, if you want to live long, go to Denmark.
     Denmark, though such a little country, used to own two islands that were perhaps ten times as big as itself. These two islands are far away from Denmark in the cold north; one is a little island called Iceland and the other is a big island called Greenland. Greenland still belongs to Denmark, but Iceland no longer does. Most people cannot see why Denmark should want either island, for Iceland is full of volcanoes and many hot springs-which seems strange, for ice and fire do not seem to go together-and Greenland is chiefly ice. I think it would be more exact if Greenland were called Iceland and Iceland were called Volcano Land. I used to know a boy who was very fat, but all his friends called him "Skinny." That is like calling this ice-covered land Greenland, so I think it was called Greenland for a joke. Only along one edge of Greenland do we find any land at all showing. The ice in Greenland is about a quarter of a mile thick, covering the land, and where the ice comes down to the water's edge big chunks often as big as a church break off and float away in the sea. They are then called icebergs, which means ice mountains.
     There are Eskimos living in Greenland. You may well wonder what the Eskimos in Greenland live on, for they can't raise any of the vege-tables we have to eat. They live chiefly on fish out of the sea and animals and birds. There are millions of birds called "auks" which fly so low and so thick over the land that the Eskimos catch them with a net as you would catch butterflies. They can catch enough to last them for many months, and as all out-of-doors is a refrigerator the birds that are caught can be kept on ice without having the ice man call every day. Eskimos use the auk's soft feathers to line their clothes to keep themselves warm and comfortable, for the thermometer sometimes goes to seventy de-grees below zero. Another bird, the eider-duck, has still softer feathers. They are called "down." Eider-down is one of the softest and lightest things imaginable and makes the best filling for bed quilts, as it is both light and warm. Eskimos eat the eider-duck's eggs, too, and they gather thousands of them at a time.
     Instead of beef, the Eskimo eats the flesh of an animal called the musk-ox. The musk-ox has hooklike horns and a shaggy long-haired coat to keep himself warm in the terrible cold. His coat makes him look big, but when he is killed and the coat removed, there is only a poor little lean animal left inside.
     There is another animal which the Eskimo hunts. It lives both in the water and on the land and has tusks like an elephant. It is called a walrus. It is also caught for meat, but chiefly for its ivory tusks, which are two big teeth that hang far down out of its mouth.
     What the Eskimo likes best to eat, however, is not lean meat but fat. A big, greasy strip of fat to him is as delicious as a banana to us. Fat food keeps people warm, and nature in its wonderful way makes fat taste good to the Eskimo because it makes him warm. People in warm countries don't like fat food because it would make them warm when they want to be cool.
     One of the most valuable furs that ladies wear is made from the coat of the seal, another animal that lives both in the water and on the ice. The Eskimo uses the sealskin to make his tents in which he lives in the summertime. The winds are so terribly strong in parts of Greenland that a tent has to be anchored down by heavy stones to keep it from blowing away. In the wintertime, however, the Eskimo makes his hut of blocks of stone-if he can find any; but if he can't, he cuts blocks of snow and makes a bowl-shaped house of that instead. Of course, his house is hardly large enough to stand up in and has only one room and no windows, so that he has to light it inside with a fire built right on the ground, or by a lamp made out of a hollowed stone with a wick soaked in the grease or fat of the animals he has killed.
     The only tame animals the Eskimo has are the Eskimo dogs, which look very much like wolves and may be cousins of the wolves. The Eskimo uses dogs hooked up to his sled, instead of a horse and carriage or automobile. Four or eight or more dogs are harnessed together and make a team. Almost all of our dogs love water; they will run and jump into a pool or into a river if given half a chance. But the Eskimo dog is afraid of water, and though he can swim he will not go into it unless he is whipped into it, and not even then if he can run away. The Eskimo, however, is not afraid of the water even when blocks of ice are floating in it. He has a canoe called a kayak which is completely covered, all except a place in the center where he sits and paddles. It is water tight, so that even when upset no water can get in. The Eskimos are experts at paddling, and they have water sports in which an Eskimo upsets his kayak on purpose and rolls over and over in the water just to show off.