Aylmer visits the North Cape; Narvik to Hammerfest; the oft-imagined midnight sun a realization; Vanniman and the sun compass; Hardanger Fjord and region; the Norwegian Sunday; a country wedding; the snow tunnel at Haukeli Sæter; the precipice of Dalen; a natural boomerang; the “Norwegian Rhine”; the romance of Helgenotra; a “stave-kirke”; Henrik Ibsen; educational difficulties in Norway; itinerant schoolmasters; the charm of Sætersdal; wherein lies the Spell of Norway?
Bredvik, Sætersdal, August 18.
My dear Judicia,
Before I tell you about Sætersdal I must say something about the North Cape and the midnight sun. Perhaps you wonder why I don’t save the famous North Cape for a climax instead of taking you up there first and then way back to the southernmost tip of Norway. My reason, which I hope later to justify, is this. To me the spell of Norway lies most of all in its dals and in its sæter regions, where the simplicity of the natives is untarnished and where the country is naturally beautiful. The place where this is true to the fullest extent is in the region whose appropriate name, Sætersdal, combines the thought of rugged upland and smiling dal.
I do not mean to minimize the glories of the North Cape. They are superb and almost too wonderful for us. They make us gasp for breath, and perhaps we feel almost tired after surveying them. I have felt “timorous” about approaching that subject at all, for many thousands of people, among them some noted writers, have visited the spot and have seen the midnight sun. Certainly ninety-nine per cent of them have tried to describe it, and many have had their attempts published.
I will not take you step by step, or port by port, on the long journey to Hammerfest, for I took you up as far as Narvik when I went there last winter, and the continuation is much the same. We pass Tromsö, the northernmost of Norway’s six bishoprics, and the town which long enjoyed the distinction of having the northernmost church in the world. Of course, thriving little Hammerfest has now robbed it of that honor. Hammerfest, I suppose, is more widely known, by name at least, than almost any other village of its size in the world, with the possible exceptions of Oberammergau and Stratford-on-Avon, which have earned their distinction in quite different ways. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl learns that Hammerfest is the most northerly town in the world. It has only two thousand inhabitants, but with the inpouring waves of tourists in the summer it becomes a most lively place. The whole town is pervaded winter and summer with a nauseating smell of boiling cod-liver oil. Doubtless the product is a fruitful source of income to the inhabitants, but personally I should hardly care to live in the reeking smell of it all my life.
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
Three Little Belles of the Arctic at Tromsö.
On the Fulgnæs, a promontory a little to the north of the town, there is the Meridianstötten, a column of granite with a bronze globe surmounting it, marking the spot, as the Latin and Norwegian inscriptions indicate, where the “geometers of three nations, by order of King Oscar I and Czars Alexander I and Nicholas I,” completed in 1852 the arduous task of measuring the degrees.