LANGLEY COLERIDGE.
[The midnight sun, as visible at the summer solstice from the North Cape of Norway, is becoming one of the necessary spectacles of modern travel. Alike for those who cannot and for those who hope to go there we give the following description of what a former traveller saw from this cape and on the way thither.]
I really cannot tell what is the great charm of Norway, nor do I think the nameless charm is the same for each. Perhaps those who are old travellers enjoy Norway most. It is well known that in order to do the Whole Duty of Travel an apprenticeship must be served, by no means an irksome one; on the contrary, full of delight; nevertheless, it is an apprenticeship, and, until it has been served, no man can pass as a member of the travelled community. The curriculum includes a knowledge of Paris, of the Rhine, of Switzerland, and a dozen regular rounds. When these have all been “done,” then comes Norway as a land of pure delight to the traveller.
There are no picture-galleries to make one’s neck ache; no museum to make the weary feet throb; no promenades; no sherry-cobblers to sip while bands play in the gardens; no continuations of London and Brighton. There are no crowds; you may see a magnificent waterfall all by yourself, or ascend a hundred Rigis without meeting a soul. There are no loafers; and you may get into boats and out of boats, into carrioles and out of carrioles, without one humpbacked beggar-boy or man with his eye in a sling to whine at you, or one officious person getting in the way in order to be paid for it. There are no mammoth hotels, where you have to climb a dozen flights of stairs before you can reach your bed; no billiards when once you have left the three chief towns; no stuffy railways to whizz you past the best scenery; no dressing for dinner.
Now, all these things, to one who has been over and over again to the most civilized places in the world, are very refreshing; and yet these are perhaps but minor points, and do not explain the secret of the great charm of Norway. Rip Van Winkle’s was a wonderful sleep; he woke and found the world had gone forward a hundred years; but the traveller who sleeps on the North Sea and wakes up in the morning in Norway has had a more wonderful sleep. He wakes and finds the world has gone back half a millennium! Southward the countries of Europe have struggled and slaved in the race for the perfection of civilization, while Norway is as it was in the beginning. Southward the countries have obeyed the watchword, “Forward!” Norway has obeyed the signal, “As you were!”
Now, fancy yourself—you, who have done as the Southerners do—arriving at a little village in an out-of-the-way place in Norway. Nobody flutters about your carriole to escort you to a hotel, but you enter the “station,” a low, rambling wooden structure, with diffidence. You see the lady of the house and shake hands with her; you ask her to be good enough to let you stay there the night; you enter a bedroom, where everything is plain as a deal box, but clean as a Dutch tulip. Then you sit down with the family in the general room to your meal. It will assuredly consist of either trout and salmon, or salmon and trout, with perhaps an egg, perhaps potatoes, perhaps black bread. No Bass, but perhaps some Norsk Öl, a very pleasant beverage. After supper you will smoke a pipe with your landlord, who will probably invite you to see the pigs, or will lend you a hand to splice up any broken harness of your carriole.
About nine or ten o’clock you will go to bed, in the broad daylight if it be summer-time, and in the morning you will wake up, finding the landlady’s daughter at your bedside, with a delicious cup of hot coffee and a natty little roll, or perchance a biscuit. And then, still early in the morning, you will bid farewell as to old friends, you will shake hands all round, and away in your carriole to drive through romantic scenery, and to feel as though Norway had been made specially for you.
Before you have been two days in the country you will love the quaint, unsophisticated people, so hearty in their kindness, so ungrudging in their hospitality, and their Old-World manners and customs, so genuine in an age of sham, so solid in an age of veneer. One great charm of Norway, then, is its people; another, and perhaps more to be appreciated by some, is its scenery.
“Is it like Switzerland?” No; Norway is only like Norway. It is not so grand as regards the height of its mountains, yet its grandeur is far more solemn. It has a dozen fjords more startling than the Lake of Lucerne; in a day’s journey you will pass waterfalls and cascades which would make a fortune to “proprietors” in Switzerland, and are not so much as mentioned in the Norwegian guide-books. Switzerland is grand beyond compare, but it must be confessed it is a monotonous grandeur. Not so with Norway: its charms of scenery are varied as they are unique. A coast wild and rugged; mighty pine-forests, interminable; lakes beautiful as Windermere; fjords awful in their grandeur; valleys rich in their fertility; fjelds bare and barren; sport with the gun, sport with the rod; these and a hundred other charms may be entered in the catalogue.
But all these are outweighed by the strange, weird beauty and grandeur of the neighborhood of the North Cape. I know of nothing that comes within the range of tourist experiences that will make a more lasting impression on the memory than a day or two in the region of the midnight sun.
For the student, the professional man, the overworked generally, and especially those whose brains are overworked, there is no tour that will be more beneficial than the one I propose briefly to sketch.
Go to Christiansand. Then, if you have never been to Norway, proceed to Christiania, and, after staying a day or two in that interesting town and neighborhood, continue your journey either to Trondhjem or Bergen, it matters not which, or, better still, if you can, do both. The trip to one, the other, or both, will give you a good idea of scenery in Norway. At either Bergen or Trondhjem take the steamer for Hammerfest. And then will commence one of the most delightful voyages it is possible to make.
The steamer keeps close to the shore, and the shore is the most curious in the world; you have but to look at a map to see its wonderful indentations; you cannot realize them until you find yourself now in a bay or a cove, now among groups of islands, then in the midst of a fjord, with sheer rocks rising perpendicularly from the sea, and anon in the harbor of a little town, with groups of wondering peasantry around you. You will see some parts of the coast so wild that you cannot credit the fact that human beings can be found there, and you will find verdant nooks so peaceful and pretty that you will be tempted to think that there, away from the world, you would like to build your house and finish up your days. At one time you will come to the haunts of water-fowl innumerable; at another a shoal of whales will be around you.
The towns and villages at which you will halt will have a special charm. The curious costumes of the people; the antique architecture of their houses and churches; the good, but old-fashioned, contrivances connected with their fishing avocations,—all these will be novel.
Among the red-letter days of the trip will be a sail among the Loffoden Islands, “jagged as the jaws of a shark,” and swarming with sea-fowl; a glimpse at the neighborhood of the Maelström, so celebrated in fable; a visit to a Lapp encampment, and an occasional stroll through some of the towns at which the steamer stays. Tromsö is one of these halting-places: it is a modern town, which has grown rapidly. It was only founded in 1794, and in 1816 had but three hundred inhabitants; now, owing to the success of its herring-fishery, it has grown strangely for Norway, and has a population of over five thousand. It is charmingly situated on an island, and its rich fertility contrasts most singularly with the wildness of the surrounding mountains. Hammerfest, too, is interesting, not only because it is the most northerly town in the world, and because “in the season” it is crowded with representatives of all nations, who come here to trade, but because here you are within the limits of the region of the Midnight Sun, and from here you will take your boat (unless you continue by the Vadsö steamer) for the North Cape.
The effect of the midnight sun has been variously described. Carlyle revels in the idea that while all the nations of the earth are sleeping, you here stand in the presence of that great power which will wake them all; Bayard Taylor delights in the gorgeous coloring; and each traveller has some new poetic thought to register. For myself the midnight sun has a solemnity which nothing else in nature has. Midnight is solemn in the darkness; it is a hundredfold more solemn in the glare of sunlight, richer than ever is sun under tropical skies. It is “silence, as of death;” not the hum of a bird, not the buzz of an insect, not the distant voice of a human being. Silence palpable. You do not feel drowsy, though it is midnight; you feel a strange fear creep over you as if in a nightmare, and dare not speak; you think what if it should be true that the world is in its last sleep, and you are the last living ones, yourselves on the verge of the Eternal Ocean?
It is amusing, afterwards, to think of the way in which you landed on your excursion to the North Cape; how every one seemed impressed with the same idea that it was a sacrilege to break the silence, and the party that set forth in high spirits had settled down into the gravity of a funeral cortége. And it is strange how the stillness and awfulness, felt while in the little boat upon the silent sea, held you spellbound and entranced; and the spell could not be broken until you set to work on the difficult climb to the head of the North Cape. And when you reached the top you felt—well, I don’t know how.
To some standing on the highest part of the plateau, a thousand feet above the sea, and looking away to that great unknown Arctic Ocean, it has seemed as if they had come to the end of the earth; that they were gazing upon the confines of the eternal regions; that they saw in the distance the outlines of the land of which it is said, “There is no night there.”
Every tourist mind has its own particular magnet. I do not know what event in the history of a tourist life most attracts my memory. No one can ever forget the day when he first gazes upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives; or Damascus seen from the Mount of Mohammed; or the sunny morning when he rounds the Golden Horn, and Constantinople bursts on the view.
These are memories which never grow dim; and I am inclined to think that when a tourist finds himself in a small boat at midnight, drawing near to the North Cape in the midst of the most gorgeous sunlight ever seen, he has found a sensation which will be green in his memory to the day of his death.
In this brief paper I have not found time to be practical. The trip to the North Cape should be made in June or July; it may be made in August or September, and in the latter month there is a chance of seeing the first blushes of the Aurora Borealis. I am much inclined to think that a winter excursion to the North Cape would be one of the grandest sensations that the tourist’s heart could wish, but of this I am not in a position to judge.
If my readers are like myself, they never bring one summer trip to a close before they have arranged in their own minds for the next; and so I throw out the hint that ere the North Cape shall be scribbled over with the names of Smith and Jones; ere excursion boats, with Ethiopian serenaders on board, shall put forth from Hammerfest; ere a big hotel shall stand upon the summit, and a man shall blow a horn to announce when “the sun is at its best,” it will be well to consider whether a trip to the North Cape is not worth serious consideration.