"It is so," coolly replied Lars the driver, and he remained silent afterwards.
I felt sorry for the poor horse, and reproached myself for not having tarried at the last post station.
Then I said to Lars, "If the horse gives out, we will try to build a snow house for us three. You have some hay, and he will not starve. As for ourselves, we will try to reach some farm and get some food and some oats for our poor dear horse. I am very sorry we have no skees with us."
There was so much snow over the land that I thought I had come to "Snow Land." It was over twelve feet in depth; it had been snowing for six consecutive days and nights, and it was snowing yet. I was now between the sixty-third and sixty-fourth degrees of north latitude, and I had to travel on the road nearly two hundred miles more before I came to the southern part of "The Land of the Long Night." The little town of Umeå for which I was bound was still far away. I said to myself, "I have to cross this 'Snow Land' before I reach 'The Land of the Long Night.' What hard work it will be!"
A little further on we came to the post station—and how glad I was to spend the night there—to get into a feather bed. The following day the snow-ploughs and the rollers were busy, and the centre of the highway was made passable for some miles further north. So bidding good-bye to the station master and to my driver of the day before, I started with a fine young horse and a strong young fellow for a driver.
As I looked around, I could see snow, snow, deep snow everywhere. The fences, the stone walls of the scattered farms, and the huge boulders with which that part of the country is covered were buried out of sight; only the tops of the birches and of the fir and pine trees could be seen. I had not met such deep snow before! I had never encountered such a continuous snowstorm! "Surely," I said to myself again, as I looked over the country, "this is 'Snow Land.'" I wondered how long it would take to cross it. The snow was nearly fourteen feet deep on a level.
I next came to a part of the country where thousands of branches of pine and fir trees had been planted in two rows to show the line of the road. I could not tell now when I was travelling over a river, a lake, on land, or over the frozen Gulf of Bothnia!
As we were passing over one of the barren districts, a swamp in summer, full of stones and boulders, without a house in sight, I said to my driver: "When are we coming to the next farm?"
"At the rate we are going," he replied, "it will take us two hours at least."
"Then let us stop and give a little of the hay you have brought with you to the horse. After he has rested a while, we will start again."