Presently these two men arrived extremely hot, and looking as if they would like beer; so we appeased them with one of our few remaining bottles, and after showing them all the sights of the camp took them out on the lake in the canoes. One of them spoke a little English, the other only French and Norwegian. The latter asked the Skipper, in the Gallic tongue, ‘if we had entrapped many fish?’ and ‘if we had not fear to venture on the lake in such small boats?’ and informed him that ‘there were many savage ducks about this year.’ The other one, regardless of his own life and safety, and also of Esau’s—in whose canoe he was sitting—would keep throwing up his arms and exclaiming, ‘It gives us moch playsure to make a travel in the Canadian căno.’ But we think they were proud and thankful when the experiment was over, and they were safe in Peter’s boat. These strangers displayed unwonted courage, for the ordinary native has a wholesome dread of our frail craft. The hardy Norseman’s house of yore was doubtless on the foaming wave, but that was before the days of Canadian canoes.
At dinner John informed the company that his bath in the lake yesterday was the third of a series the first of which took place in Montenegro, the second in Algiers, and now this in Norway. He calls this a humble tribute to the geniality of the English summer, and thinks that he may be termed ‘a polyglot ablutionist.’ Some of the sojourners in this camp say it may be so, but it does not speak highly for John’s love of water when undiluted with whisky.
Subsequently we found that the bath which he swaggered about only occurred because he fell off a rock into the lake, and so dabbled about afterwards while his clothes were drying, which does not take long in this weather. This also accounts for the condition in which he returned to camp, ‘sans bags, sans shirt, sans everything,’—barring his boots.
Late at night Esau, who was up last, put his head into the tent to remark that there was a first-rate comet on view, but he was received with such execrations from the other two lazy people in bed that he thought it prudent to say no more about it, and not to look at it any more himself.
August 13.—
We spent the morning making a meat safe. This meat safe consists of a hole in the ground, neatly flagged with flat stones, and walled with the same, and furnished at the top with a wooden frame, into which fits a lid with hooks underneath it for birds. The whole is covered with a piece of muslin to keep off the villanous bluebottles. The muslin was brought to make into mosquito nets inside the tent, but in this happy spot the ‘skeeter’ is unknown, the sand-fly very rare, and the great green-eyed Möge—which bites a lump out of your leg and then flies to the nearest tree to eat it—is conspicuous by its absence.
We have always been very careful not to prepare in any way for game before it is killed, but this usually successful plan has been a failure this year, so now we are desperate, and have made a safe which will hold a reindeer, and probably with a little more bad luck shall even go out stalking with ropes in our pockets ready to tie up the animal when killed. We caught Öla a week ago carving a piece of stick into the double-ended thing that butchers put between the legs of sheep to keep them apart (name unknown), but we promptly seized it, and made it into the handle of a frying-pan. But who can escape his destiny? We hoped that we had averted misfortune, but the deed was done, and no doubt it was owing to this that the Skipper failed to get a shot at the ‘store bocks.’
When John and Esau had finished the safe and succeeded in catching enough nice fish for the requirements of the camp, they were seized with the desire of making a good bath. We have no first-rate bathing-place near the camp, as the glacier-river has made the lake too shallow round its mouth, and it is some distance to where the shore becomes bold and rocky.
They selected a nice little stream on the hill just above the tent, and toiled like navvies there for about four hours under a blazing sun, excavating and paving with flat stones, making a most palatial bath in the bed of the stream; when behold! just as it was completed, to use the graphic language of one of the constructors, ‘May I be dodderned, and doggoned, and dingblamed by Pike, if the blooming stream didn’t cease to run!’ It did just supply about a pint of water before it quite stopped, into which Esau’s watch flew as he flung on his coat with some slight, and perhaps excusable, show of temper. A pint of water is not enough for a man to bathe in, but it is quite sufficient to saturate a watch, especially if a stone obligingly smashes the glass and makes a hole in its face obliterating the vii. viii. and ix. at the time of its immersion. However, he dug the mud out of the works, filled them with Rangoon oil, and is under the impression that that watch can be made to go again, and that a new face and glass and silver case will make it look all right. He is of a sanguine disposition.
They returned to camp saying that it would be all right as soon as the first rain came, but they reckoned without their host; the stream came from a little snowdrift on the mountain, and next time that Esau went up there he found that the heat of the last few days had melted it all away; hence its sudden stop. It never ran again. Perchance some future traveller will find the bath ages hence, and rejoice in its luxurious arrangements. In anticipation of this John wrote the following beautiful lines on the most prominent rock:—