that I escaped with life, though certainly not without excessive fatigue and loss of strength.
After having thus for a long time gone in pursuit of my new Lapland guide, we reposed ourselves about six o'clock in the morning, wrung the water out of our clothes, and dried our weary limbs, while the cold north wind parched us as much on one side as the fire scorched us on the other, and the gnats kept inflicting their stings. I had now my fill of travelling.
The whole landed property of the Laplander who owns this tract consists chiefly of marshes, here called stygx. A divine could never describe a place of future punishment more horrible than this country, nor could the Styx of the poets exceed it. I may therefore boast of having visited the Stygian territories.
We now directed our steps towards the desert of Lapmark, not knowing where we went.
A man who lived nearest to the forlorn
spot just described, but had not been at it for twenty years past, went in search of some one to conduct me further, while I rested a little near a fire. I wished for nothing so much as to be able to go back by water to the place from whence I came; but I dreaded returning to the boat the way we had already passed, knowing my corporeal frame to be not altogether of iron or steel. I would gladly have gone eight or ten miles by a dry road to the boat, but no such road was here to be found. The hardy Laplanders themselves, born to labour as the birds to fly, could not help complaining, and declared they had never been reduced to such extremity before. I could not help pitying them.
A marsh called Lyckmyran (lucky marsh), but which might more properly be called Olycksmyran (unlucky marsh), gives rise to a small rivulet which takes its course to Lycksele, and abounds with ochre. The water is covered with a film.
I am persuaded that iron might be found there.
[30] When Linnæus wrote this sentence, he seems to have had a presentiment of his own matrimonial fate, just the reverse in this very point of that he was describing.
[31] It may seem presumptuous to attempt the solution of a question which Linnæus has thus left in the dark; but perhaps the almost continual action of the prevailing strong winds, such as he describes in many parts of his journal, may give a twist to the fibres of these pines during their growth.