Sampo began to wonder when he heard this; but he said nothing. He thought to himself: "It must be good fun to see such a horrid creature as the mountain king,—but only from a long way off!"
It was now already three or four weeks after Christmas, and it was still dark in Lapland. There was no morning, noon, nor evening. It was always night; and the moon shone, and the Northern Lights crackled, and the stars twinkled brightly all the time. Sampo began to feel dull. It was so long since he had seen the sun that he had almost forgotten what it looked like; and when any one talked of summer Sampo only remembered it was the time when the gnats were so bad and tried to eat him up. Therefore he did not care if the summer stayed away forever, if only it would grow light enough to go about easily on snow-shoes.
One day about noon the Lapp said: "Come here, and you shall see something!" Sampo crept out of the hut in the dark, and looked toward the south, for it was in that direction that his father pointed. There he saw a little red streak way down on the horizon.
"Do you know what that is?" asked the Lapp.
"That is Southern Lights," said the boy. He had a good idea of the points of the compass, and knew very well that you could not see Northern Lights in the south.
"No," said his father, "that is the forerunner of the sun. To-morrow or the day after we shall see the sun itself. Only look how strangely the red light shines on the top of Rastekais."
Sampo turned to the west and saw how the snow was colored red far away on the dark, wild top of Rastekais. Immediately it came into his mind how very pleasant it would be to see the mountain king—from a long way off.
Sampo thought about this all day and half the night. He tried to sleep, but could not. "Yes," he thought, "it would be fun to see the mountain king once!" He kept thinking about it, until at last he crept quite softly out from the reindeer-skin under which he lay, and out through the door. It was so cold that the stars snapped and the snow crackled under his feet. But Sampo Lappelil was not afraid of cold. Besides he had a leather jacket, leather trousers, Lapp shoes, and a fur cap and mittens. Thus fortified, he looked at the stars, and did not know exactly what he should do next.
Then he heard his little reindeer scratching in the snow not far off. "What if I took a drive?" thought Sampo.
No sooner said than done. Sampo harnessed the reindeer before the pulk as he usually did, and started off over the great bare snow-field. "I will drive a little way toward Rastekais, only a little way," he thought to himself. So he drove down over the frozen river and up on the other side of the Tana, and then was in the kingdom of Norway, for the Tana River is the boundary. But that Sampo did not know.