Three times whilst this process was going on had we with torch and fingers cleared the room of mosquitoes; three times had fresh swarms arrived to take possession. The building was full of chinks; it was impossible for us to stop them up; and so with pain (and some profanity) we made up our minds to accept kismet, and let the enemy do their worst. We crawled into our sleeping-sacks, and tried to doze.
Never was there a greater failure. The stinging little pests settled on us in their hundreds, and sleep was out of the question. It was twelve o’clock at night, and the sun outside, high in the heavens, was beating on the shingle roof till the room within was like an oven. The air reeked with sourness from the milk on the shelves, and we were tormented with an unquenchable thirst as a result of our bites. Hayter, by the way, was in a tidy fever.
We tried pulling the heavy blanket-sacks over our heads and getting off to sleep that way. But the result inside was a choking Turkish bath, and as the mosquitoes got in also, we did not get much profit that way. We tried leaving our heads outside the sacks, and protecting them with hats and veils, but that was a more dismal failure still. And finally we were reduced to lying on our backs and keeping our faces in the midst of a halo of pungent, stinging, ship’s tobacco-smoke.
In the meanwhile we had not been left in our lonesomeness. Almost the entire time we had one visitor or another staring as though we had been strange and slightly amusing animals. It is a curious trait of the Lapps, that although in many simple ways they are a very polite people, they will enter your room at any time without knocking or asking any trace of permission, and will stare complacently at what is going on without uttering so much as a word of comment.
A weird crew they were too, this audience at Menesjärvi, and it was hard at times to persuade ourselves that we had not gone to sleep after all, and that these were merely the people of fever and nightmare. They were most of them deformed. One hump-backed girl, with pigeon breast and a livid face, had a wedding ring on her finger and a couple of puny brats at her heels. Intermarriage does dreadful work amongst some of these isolated communities. Those who have been on Fair Island, that tiny patch of land between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, where once an Armada ship was wrecked, will have seen a grisly instance of this nearer home.
The dogs alone were well-shapen and well-cared for. But then the Lapps always are kind to their dogs, just as the Northern Finns are almost invariably brutal.
[Sketches] at Menesjärvi