But a change came swiftly. Once we had passed the mouth of this sea-river, and green tints grew on the rock walls, which deepened as we steamed on. It was only slime at first, but then came patches of moss, then bosky lawns of grass, and dwarf shrubs in the more sheltered corries. The snow line on the hillsides rose towards the summits. The snow patches in the crevices below grew smaller and more few. Then in a tiny bay we saw a cabin of logs set in a glow of green. Here was young rye sprouting. And yet that horrible coast line of the Varanger which we had just left was only two miles distant, and by straining the eye we could see the horizon whiten where the seas creamed over the guardian reefs.
The [Gates] of Russian Lapland.
The walls of the fjord were still high and some quarter of a mile apart. The lane of water ran between them, straight as a canal. But always as we went on mountains grew lower. Presently at the mouth of a contributory valley we opened out on a small settlement of felt-roofed wooden houses, with what looked like colossal pink sausages drawn up on the beach before them. As we drew nearer a waft of odour came to us down a slant of the wind, and we laughed in pleasure because we were going to meet again old friends that we thought we had left behind for good. The pink sausages were flensed Finner whales. In the wooden buildings they were trying out the blubber, sorting and packing the precious bone, and working up the beef into its many useful shapes. And the smell of it all filled the air till one could almost dredge it out in handfuls.
Once more we steamed on, beyond sight of the sea now, with the mountains drooping to mere uplands on the fjord sides, with the scrub trees replaced by forests of graceful twenty-foot birches, which covered the gentle slopes. The air was warm—warm as an English summer. And, note well the occasion, the first mosquito came to us. We hailed him as a friend then. Hayter had seen him last in Florida, I had heard his music a year before on the Gold Coast, and we both mentioned that the mosquitoes had no power over us, that our skins were invulnerable. Little did we know the biting power of this Northern monster; bitterly were we to learn it.
The fjord narrowed, the little steamer anchored, and we put ashore with some score of others. Our slender baggage was to go round to Elvenaes, on the Syd Varanger, but we had elected to walk across the intervening neck of land.
And now with the memory big in us of that grim savage coast not a dozen miles away, we stepped out down a veritable country lane between slender birches, with linnets singing behind the foliage on either hand. There were oak ferns and bracken under the trees, and in the open meads, buttercups, pansies, cow-parsley, forget-me-nots, wild pelargonium, dandelions, ranunculi, bright pink campions, and cranberries, with everlasting moss, and other mosses, and grotesque lichens in all abundance. The comely woods were musical with birds, and portioned off by rustic fences. Here and there were gates, slung on hinges, and then would come a fine trim house of logs covered with painted weather boarding. We might have been walking in the Tyrol. And when we remembered that the Arctic circle was over two hundred miles farther to the southward, and the desolation we had come through still close at hand to the north, we had to grant that Nature could perform more white magic than we ever credited her with before.
The narrowing fjord ended in a rolling bay, and against a boat-house built there was a great cemetery of reindeer horns, heaped up as things of no beauty or value. A stream went on beside the road, babbling into idyllic trout-pools. Cow-bells tinkled from within the woods. The passengers from the coaster had branched off singly and in groups till only seven of us were left: the roystering Jew, a gloomy young farmer in high boots, with his sick wife, a nondescript girl, and our two selves. At intervals we talked, and the Jew gathered flowers for the women, and then we came to a large house of wood.
It was exactly three o’clock in the morning, but in this sunlit land no one troubles much with bed, and the owner was standing in his doorway to take the air. The Jew made discourse—all tongues seemed equally facile to him,—and the householder came out and shook us all by the hand, and insisted that we should come inside. The women went off in charge of his women-kind, but us men he took into the parlour, where we gazed upon a picture of Martin Luther, some Sloyd work, and an elaborate stove, and watched the farmer grow drowsy over yarns of bear-hunting in the winter months. But presently our host set before us beer—delicious Bayersk öl—which we all drank standing, with a heartfelt cry of “skaal”! We wanted that beer badly, and it came to us as a pleasant surprise. We fancied we had left such luxuries behind us for many a long week; for Lapland is what they call in America “a Prohibition State.”
The Jew by this time had quite assumed our chaperonage, and though inclined to linger over his beer and to hint at another bottle, said he would come with us when we decided to start. Our fellow-travellers came to the door to see us off. The sick woman had grown quite a pretty colour from her walk and from the mild excitement of drinking milk. And we took leave of them all with handshakes as though they were ancient friends. Finally, the Jew tore himself away, and we set out again towards Elvenaes under his convoy.