For the last stage of that day’s sixteen hours’ drive, the karre was horsed by a young black stallion, which systematically ran away with us up hill and down ravine, over bridges and through sand-mires. The pace was exhilarating, but as we were bruised all over with the previous jolting, we could have put up with a somewhat slower gait.
On this stage we were due to recross that imaginary boundary, the Arctic Circle, and come once more into that Temperate Zone which was our more native atmosphere, and we were on the keen look-out for some official recognition of its whereabouts. I do not quite know what we expected to see—a cairn or a wooden notice would have satisfied us—but the absence of any mark whatever jarred upon us. That a country which could mark off the kilometres on its roads with fine red posts, should ignore a geographical acquisition like the Arctic Circle, seemed a piece of unappreciative barbarism.
It was after midnight when the galloping stallion brought us into the town of Rovaniemi. It was the most considerable place in the North, and the post-house was almost an hotel. At any rate, after some dilatoriness, it provided us with a meal, which was an item we were severely in need of.
The place was quite awake. In fact all through this land of staring daylight there never seemed to be any hour when some at least of the population were not awake and doing. When we turned into our beds at 2 A.M. I noticed a ploughman still at work in the field across the road. It was a curious instrument he was handling—like an overgrown garden-hoe, with a pair of shafts instead of one. A lean horse was between the shafts, and the ploughman held the angle of the hoe and lifted the whole thing bodily round with one hand when he came to the end of a furrow. For a shallow cut in light soil it was rather effective.
Under a scorching sun next day we went out to look at the town. There is one main street of unobtrusive stores in Rovaniemi, with dwelling-houses lying back on one side, and the river swirling along in rapids at the other. At one end of the town was a hospital, each little room with its own white stove; and next it was a curious campanile in the form of a pagoda of brown, white, and yellow, with roofs of dragon-scale shingling, and a lofty, slender vane, whilst the Lutheran church, for which this campanile rang its bells, was a hundred yards away. This church was rather a fine old building, in cruciform, with its yellow walls striped with white, and a white cross high above the silver-gray shingling of its roof. On the church door were posted the private earmarks of the reindeer owned in the neighbourhood, which, for the sake of curiosity, we copied.
We went back to the post-house again for a meal—it was fine to be at a place where one could get food for the mere buying—and we saw there a woman swinging an infant in a cradle slung from the ceiling. How it did arouse memories! How often we had seen in a Lapland farm-kitchen a basket dangling from the rafters at the end of reindeer traces, and a youngster packed in it, and the fond mother crooning the Lappish equivalent of “Hush thee, my baby,” and launching the small unfortunate back through fifteen feet of space every time it swung up to her.
A well-dressed cripple hobbled into the room when we were eating, with his knee-cap half cut off by the jamming of a log-raft. He persisted in exhibiting the wound, and then rubbed his sleek, round belly to intimate that he was starving. As he was one of the most prosperous-looking men we had seen in Rovaniemi, it did not occur to us for some time that he was soliciting alms, and it was not till he had put the matter still more forcibly, that we exuded coinage to the extent of three halfpence. He put it in his pocket and shook hands cordially with each of us, and intimated in a few simple and carefully-chosen words that we should receive our reward in due course from on high. In fact he was really so business-like about his begging, that we quite expected that he would bring out a book of printed forms and give us a receipt.
We did not get much privacy at Rovaniemi. The landlord regarded us much in the light of a travelling circus, and brought us in relays of callers whenever we were on the premises. We were not too shy, however, to make use of them. We pumped them on every subject on which they could give information, and amongst other things on how we were to continue our journey down to the coast, and where we should best find shipping for England. We had had a sufficiency of the bumpy-bumpy motion of the Finnish post-cart to prefer other means of transport if it was available, and so we asked with interest about the river route. There seemed a good deal of diversity of opinion. Finally the best steersman in Rovaniemi was brought in, a white-haired old fellow, with a clever, clean-shaven face, and he offered to take us down as far as a series of falls twenty kilometres above Kemi, and no farther. He proposed to take us so far for M.50, a tremendous sum in Northern Finland when one remembers that the rates for posting, all inclusive, varied between M.0·14 and M.0·19 per kilometre, the mark being about tenpence English.