We had been carried three-and-sixty miles from Küstula by the tireless fingers of the river. We got out of the canoe and turned our backs on it. Beyond us lay fields gleaming with dew-diamonds. Beyond again, lay the dwellings of Kittila.
The Squire led us up to a house and woke the inmates. We were given a room with walls actually papered—with newspapers. A sleepy woman shuffled off her bedclothes and put on a second garment; but she brisked up when she saw the strangers were curious people from a far country. And in a while supper was set before us: the dog-biscuit of the country, the shell of a Dutch cheese, and thirteen bay-leaf anchovies in a tin. And then we were given beds with sheets. Here was refinement: we actually undressed to do justice to it.
A road fit for wheeled vehicles runs through Kittila, and another road, though a bad one, intersects it lower down and leads to Sodankyla. The houses of the little town are scattered picturesquely on either side of this road, and are for the most part stained dragon’s-blood red, or turmeric yellow, with white window-sashes. They have a fine taste for colour in Kittila. All the better houses are enclosed within their own neat fences, and of its sort it would be hard to find a more comely townlet. Even the shops are no disfigurement, and they are more than twenty in number—quite one-third of all the houses. They display no sign-boards, and they do not exhibit goods in the windows to give possible buyers cheap views from the public thoroughfares.
Every house has its well or wells, straddled over by a huge hoisting-derrick, of the same construction one may see in Spain, or Southern France, or elsewhere. No house is very large. The risk of fire is always in the air, and a man as he grows richer, or as his family increases, does not add an annexe to his original home, but builds a second house a few yards away, and then others, following a rectangular plan, till at length he has made himself a courtyard, walled round with barns and dwellings.
A marvellous tidiness pervades everything. All is kept in good repair. Not a shingle is displaced from the neat brown roofs, not a scrap of the farm middens is allowed to straggle. There is no litter anywhere. And yet these people are Finns of the same race as those squalid, listless savages we had been living amongst only a few days before. The country Finn and his long boot are inseparable; even the Squire and Nilas wore them, although they had telescoped the tops almost down to their ankles; but in Kittila the high boot was no longer de rigeur. Lace boots were the ordinary wear. Even shoes were not uncommon.
The two largest buildings in Kittila were a big, square schoolhouse with a high, red stockade, and a large, high-spired church. The school was having holiday when we were there, and does its business during the bleak, black months of winter.
The church, in magpie black and white, was hideous. But it was an elaborate building for all that, with granite foundations, an interior of grim massiveness, and shutters in the belfry of its wooden tower, opening and closing like a swell-box of an organ. At the back of the church was a cemetery, grass-grown and neglected, with wooden and cast-iron crosses and devices at the grave heads, most with all inscription quite obliterated. One, over a new grave had the formal hic jacet scrawled in pencil. Another, which was practically a log-built mausoleum, had crumbled in places and fallen in, till the dry bones of the dead shivered at the draught from the crevices. It seemed as though the Finn once out of life dropped out of memory also, and all care for his resting-place ceased. It was a utilitarian trait, perhaps, but it was not quite an amiable one.
There is a chemist in Kittila with whom we foregathered and drank lemonade, and I do not think it is maligning him to say that he had a greater liking for winter sledge-exercise than for the mere compounding of drugs and prescribing for human ailments. He owned six driving-deer, did this Arctic chemist, which of course, when we were there, were running out on the fjeld and getting into fettle. He had his private earmark, drawn on parchment, and stored in an envelope. It was a mere outline of two bows—thus