The Hermione lay at the head of that small branch of the sea called the Heimdalfjord. This long and narrow inlet is an insignificant branch of a greater fjord where steamers ply their irregular traffic; where British tourists gaze up with weary eyes at the towering rocks and bleak cliffs; and where, during the long silent twilight winter, the winds howl and roar round the bare crags. On either side of the Heimdalfjord the gray hopeless cliffs rose a sheer two thousand feet, while the blue deep water lapped their base with scarce a ripple. The fjord lay between the mighty barriers with a solemn sense of profundity in the stillness of its bosom. One could almost picture to one's self the continuation of the steep incline into a great dark valley beneath the superficial ripple, where mighty marine growths reared their brown branches up towards the dim light, never swaying to the ocean swell—where strange northern fishes and slow crawling things lived on unknown, unclassified.
Amid such surroundings, upon the face of so large a nature, the Hermione looked incongruous. Her clean long spars, her white awning, the yellow gleam of her copper beneath the clear water, all suggested another world where comfort and small refinement live. Here all is of a rougher, larger stamp. Here man and his petty tastes are as nothing. The bleak and dismal mountains were not created for his habitation, for nothing grows there, and human ingenuity, human enterprise, can do naught with such stony chaos.
On the entire Heimdalfjord there are but two boats—mere pinewood craft heavily tarred. One is owned by Hans Olsen, who lives far away at the point where the Sognfjord begins, and the other belongs to Christian Nielsen, who farms the two acres of poor soil at the head of the Heimdalfjord. No steamer has ever churned the still waters; few yachts have ventured up to the head of the inlet, where there is no attraction to the sightseer. But Nielsen looked every year for the white sails of the Hermione, and with native conscientiousness refrained from netting the river that ran past his brown log-hut.
The river brought him in more money than his farm, and even at this out-of-the-world corner of the Heimdalfjord money and the lust of it are the chief movers of men's hearts. Five hundred crowns a year was a sum worth thinking about, worth depriving one's self of a little salmon for, which, after all, was plentiful enough when once the Hermione had cast anchor.
Four miles down the fjord there was another break in the great wall of mountains, and a second river danced gaily down its narrow barren valley to the sea. From this river-mouth a small boat was now making its way under sail up the fjord. A tiny speck of white was all the girl could distinguish from the deck of the yacht, and she stood silently watching its approach until the form of the sailor sitting low in the bow of the small brown craft was discernible.
The sun had set some time before, so that the water was in shadow, deep and blue; but up on the hills and away to the south upon the distant snow-clad mountains a warm pink glow lay hazily. Deep purple vales of shade broke the line of cliffs abutting the water here and there. Where the hills closed together, five miles away (so that the fjord appeared to be a lake), there was a rich background of blue transparency through which the broken crags loomed vaguely. It was nearly nine o'clock, and this clear twilight was all the darkness that would come to the Heimdal that July night.
The breeze held its own bravely against the soporific influence of Arctic sunset, and with full taut sail the dinghy splashed and gurgled through the waters. The steersman was invisible by reason of the reefless sail, but his handiwork was apparent and very good. A wonderfully straight course had he steered from the mouth of the river, such a course as a purposeful man will steer when he is without companion beyond his own thoughts.
'He's driving her along!' muttered the steward, as he stood for a moment at the galley-door.
'The driving is like unto the driving of Jehu,' answered old Captain Barrow, who was smoking his evening pipe upon his own small piece of deck between the galley and the after-companion.
Captain Barrow rarely missed an opportunity of throwing at the head of the steward, who (like most good cooks) was a godless person, a Biblical quotation more or less correct.