[CHAPTER X]
ON TO POKKA, WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO PRINCE
JOHANN OF LAPLAND
Here then was Ivalomati, the village we had looked for so long, a place made up of one small house of logs, one squalid barn with yawning sides, and an adult population of three souls—a woman and two men. The adult population was away fishing, or rather attempting to fish, for, as it turned out, the toil of twenty-four hours brought forth no catch. A swarm of children of every age, from the crawler upwards, was left in charge. It was the eldest girl, a shy, wild creature, almost pretty, who took the canoe and brought us across the river; and she it was who offered us all the poor house could afford—a small, bare room.
There was more evidence of real poverty open to the public view in Ivalomati than at any other place we visited in Arctic Lapland. The children had not got summer clothes—the first we had seen lacking them. They wore the tattered rags of some winter furs, exposing three-quarters of their wretched skins to the intolerable bitings of the mosquitoes. We made a half-hearted attempt to buy food, and learned definitely what we had guessed, that they had no food even for themselves.
Life there might be hard, but the adults of Ivalomati were not the sort to make it most endurable. The two men were Finns, slack, doltish, and indolent. The woman was a Lapp, worn out with much child-bearing. The large-skulled, hybrid children seemed to have no occupation except to play about on a mud heap and try and stay their bellies by chewing the sappy river-grass.
A tattered, ancient net with birch-bark floats fluttered from the rotten drying-posts, a plantation of weeds flourished inside a broken-down fence, and these were the only indications of how a livelihood was made. Judging from the fly-blown, grass-covered midden outside the crumbling barn, there once had been a cow in Ivalomati, and a cracked iron cauldron, still holding the traces of a stew of reed grass and fish offal, gave indications that the cow had been fed according to the orthodox fashion of the country; but when we saw the place the cow was not, and all that stood between the wretched bipeds and starvation were the few small fish they could manage to dredge out of the Ivalojoki.
We “killed a tin” that night, and washed it down with a dose of weak cocoa; and after dinner the door opened and our three carriers came in with a peace-offering. Each had an armful of mouldy hay, which he deposited on the floor, and Johann gleefully waved a foul brown-calico sheet, which he pointed out would make us a most luxurious mosquito-bar. It seemed as though we were really going to get a comfortable night’s sleep, and we wanted it.
The hay smelt of mustiness, and the sheet smelt of something worse, but we were in no mood for niceties. The room was alive with mosquitoes. Once, twice, and three times did we make raids upon them, and burn thousands with flaring torches, and for a moment the place would be clear. But only for a moment. Through the innumerable chinks of the walls of the roof there flew in constantly fresh thousands, who would drum their pas de charge and set to work on our suffering bodies with heroic disregard of consequences. Desperately weary though we might be, there was no sleep to be got whilst one lay exposed to that horrible, relentless biting.