Our steamer, in going from Hammerfest to the North Cape, passes the Hjelmöstoren cliff, the home of millions, perhaps of billions of flapping, shrieking sea birds. Although the old birds and the wise ones are never disturbed by the passing steamer, even when it fires off a gun, the young fledgelings flap about in such clouds that they actually darken the face of the sun.
Finally we reach the grand old North Cape on the island of Magerö. The steamer drops anchor in Hornvik Bay, and we leave it and zigzag up the newly built road to the famous cliff. Our good ship Kong Harald looks like a beetle floating on the water’s surface. The waves, which seemed rather formidable to us from the little boat which took us ashore, have now assumed the appearance of almost invisible ripples.
Come to the edge of the cliff with me, Judicia, and you will see a sight which you will never forget. If your nerves are strong and your conscience is clear, you may not tremble at the awfulness of the scene. But unless you are dead to emotion, something must stir within you. Far below and far beyond stretches the apparently limitless Arctic Sea—the vast, fatal, compelling sea which brave men of many nations have died in exploring. And there surely is the midnight sun. It must be that, for it is just midnight, and that great red ball of fire hanging a little above the horizon is very evidently not the moon. It is easy, isn’t it, to speak of the midnight sun, and hard to realize it. That mysterious golden globe bowling lazily along the northern horizon is in process of making a million sunsets and a million sunrises in other parts of the world, but here all is blended into one. Doctor John L. Stoddard, in a burst of eloquence, has thus described the color scheme which nature here presents:
“Far to the north the sun lay in a bed of saffron light over the clear horizon of the Arctic Ocean. A few bars of dazzling orange cloud floated above, and still higher in the sky, where the saffron melted through delicate rose color into blue, hung light wreaths of vapor touched with pearly opaline flushes of pink and golden gray. The sea was a web of pale slate color shot through and through with threads of orange and saffron, from the dance of a myriad shifting and twinkling ripples. The air was filled and permeated with a soft, mysterious glow, and even the very azure of the southern sky seemed to shine through a net of golden gauze. Midway … stood the midnight sun, shining on us with subdued fires and with the gorgeous coloring of an hour for which we have no name, since it is neither sunset, nor sunrise, but the blended loveliness of both.…”
Flowery as the language is, it is not one particle exaggerated. Exaggeration would be impossible.
A less ambitious author frankly admits his inability to describe a northern midsummer night. “The memory of one night in Norway,” he says, “makes one feel how powerless language is to describe the splendor of that … glory—glory of carmine and orange and indigo, which floods not only the heavens, but the sea, and makes the waves beneath our keel a ‘flash of living fire.’”
A more scientific, if less poetic person, who visited the northland was Vanniman, the American engineer, who was with Wellman when he made his unsuccessful attempt to reach the North Pole by airship. Vanniman perhaps neglected the beauties of nature for the more sordidly practical occupation of inventing a sun compass. The principle of this instrument is most interesting. Reasoning that at the precise moment of midnight the sun is due north, he “constructed a clock the hour hand of which traveled in the opposite direction to the sun, so that, on being pointed at the midnight sun and set going, it continued to point due north.”
I would feel more reluctant to tear myself and you from the glories of the North Cape were it not that quieter, gentler glories await us farther south. In the deep blue Hardanger Fjord and its surroundings we find all nature gentler and milder, even in its grandeur, than the nature of the far north or even of the rugged Sogne. The Hardanger district is fir-clothed and alder and birch-clothed as well, and presents a softer loveliness than the knotted, “brawny” aspect of other fjords. I’ll venture to say that the word Hardanger suggests to you, Judicia, only a species of embroidery, but if you had only seen the district it would suggest warmth of forest-clothed dal, majesty of lofty waterfall, and depth of cool fjord. Hardanger is famous, even in Norway, for its waterfalls. It outdoes the Romsdal. The Skjeggedalsfos is quite the finest in all Europe, and would not blush if placed beside Niagara, while several other foses in the Hardanger district are nearly as fine.
Sometimes the Hardanger’s gentle smile has savored of the nature of a mask, for in one of its foses it has kept a lurking danger. Far inland through the Eidfjord and the Simodal there is on a high plateau a glacier named the Rembesdal. From this a stream trickles into a mountain lake, then to plunge over a cliff into the Simodal. In former years, whenever the snow melted suddenly on the Rembesdal Glacier, the water thus formed would collect in a rocky upland valley choked off by the glacier itself from every exit. The water would gradually collect here until it was a small lake in itself, and still the glacier barred its way to freedom. Finally the strain would become too great, the barrier would give away, and the irresistible mass of ice, pushed on by the lake which it had formed, would plunge madly down into the lower lake, then over the cliff, and down into the peaceful, unsuspecting Simodal, where it would drown and destroy all that lay in its path. Finally human skill came to the aid of nature, and Norwegian engineers built under the glacier an iron tunnel through which the waters of the upper, artificial lake may drain down into the lower, natural lake.
