The Lyngen Fjord—Lapp Encampment in the Tromsdal—A Smuke Pige—Lapp Huts and Babies—Reindeer, and their Manifold Uses—Loading Cattle—Farewell Appearance of the Midnight Sun—Scenes among the Steerage.
The steamer remained a few hours at Hammerfest on our return from the North Cape, to take on a cargo of oil and dried fish. As we proceeded down the Sörö fjord we remained nearly the whole afternoon on the captain’s bridge. The surface of the fjord was as smooth as oil, and the grand panorama of snow-covered mountains was reflected in the transparent waters.
There is much sameness to the mountain scenery, the formation and outlines of the various peaks being much alike, lacking the individuality found in Switzerland in the monarchs of the Bernese Oberland, or the circle of mountain peaks around the Gorner Grat, Piz Languard, or about Chamonix. The Norwegian mountains do not rise to half the height of the Alpine peaks, but as one views them nearly from base to summit, rising from the ocean crowned with snow and ice, the effect is fully as imposing.
The most magnificent mountain scenery we saw in the North was along the Lyngen fjord, where an unbroken chain of mountain peaks from five thousand to six thousand five hundred feet high rise from the ocean, some with sharply cut outlines and abrupt rocky sides, others covered with snow, with glaciers descending far into the valleys. It was a sublime sight as we viewed them at eleven o’clock in the evening, the glistening ice streams extending down their barren sides, and the crystal heights contrasting with the dark rocks and water at their base.
If one makes the trip to the North Cape the last of June he enjoys the mountain scenery in all its glory, as the mountains are then covered with snow, and newly fallen snow clothes their sides, extending at times almost to the water. The long unending days then add an especial charm, but the view of the midnight sun, which appears high in the heavens much like the sun the latter part of a June afternoon, is not so impressive as when seen the last of July, when it descends near the horizon. The first part of August, when within the Arctic Circle the sun begins to go below the horizon, is the time for viewing the glorious sunsets and the gorgeous coloring of the Northern skies. In June, even when the sun is shining brightly, the air is generally cool, and one needs thick clothing, while at times rain, mist, and penetrating ocean breezes necessitate an abundance of wraps.
Although there is a sameness, yet the constant succession of fjords, mountains, and glaciers never becomes monotonous to a true lover of nature, and there is always something to awaken fresh interest aside from the scenery, as the spouting of whales in the distance, the reindeer browsing high up the sides of the precipitous walls of rock, or the numerous sea fowl on the islands and cliffs.
On arriving at Tromsö we visited the Lapp encampment, which is one of the show-places of the North. The Lapps are notified by the steamship companies, and hired to drive down a portion of their reindeer into an enclosure near a little settlement of Lapp huts, where they are shown to the tourist free of charge.
We met one of the tourist steamers at Tromsö, and together with its passengers visited the encampment, which is situated in a valley called the Tromsdal. We embarked in small boats and were rowed across the wide fjord to the shore, where a collection of boys and men, with saddle horses, gave us a warm welcome and interviewed us, till they found we were determined to walk.
Our party were glad of a chance for an hour’s walk, after the confinement of the steamer, and starting up the valley we soon came to a few tents covered with reindeer hides. Several Lapps came out to sell us articles of their manufacture, among whom was an old woman clothed in reindeer skins worn with the hair turned inward, and her greasy, furrowed face framed in a bright-colored close-fitting cap.
She was hardly a “nut-brown maid,” but rather a smoked bacon hag, and as she took a reindeer girdle and bound it around the waist of the old bachelor of the party, in answer to his question as to its use, he shook his forefinger at her, and with a fascinating smile in his beaming eyes uttered, Smuke Pige, which doubled up the Lapps, old and young, and also the steamer party, with laughter; for Smuke Pige does not mean smoked pig, as its sound and orthography might imply, but is the Norwegian for pretty girl. It was many a decade since that old, oily, unwashed Lapp woman had been a Smuke Pige, even if ever, at the remotest period of her existence, by the greatest stretch of the imagination, she could have been thus designated; but woman’s nature lay dormant beneath the accumulated layers of dirt, and she smiled and smoothed down the folds of her reindeer polonaise, so pleased by the compliment that she sold the girdle for half price.