With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 4

by Unknown

[The midnight sun, as visible at the summer solstice from the North Cape of Norway, is becoming one of the necessary spectacles of modern travel. Alike for those who cannot and for those who hope to go there we give the following description of what a former traveller saw from this cape and on the way thither.]

I really cannot tell what is the great charm of Norway, nor do I think the nameless charm is the same for each. Perhaps those who are old travellers enjoy Norway most. It is well known that in order to do the Whole Duty of Travel an apprenticeship must be served, by no means an irksome one; on the contrary, full of delight; nevertheless, it is an apprenticeship, and, until it has been served, no man can pass as a member of the travelled community. The curriculum includes a knowledge of Paris, of the Rhine, of Switzerland, and a dozen regular rounds. When these have all been “done,” then comes Norway as a land of pure delight to the traveller.

There are no picture-galleries to make one’s neck ache; no museum to make the weary feet throb; no promenades; no sherry-cobblers to sip while bands play in the gardens; no continuations of London and Brighton. There are no crowds; you may see a magnificent waterfall all by yourself, or ascend a hundred Rigis without meeting a soul. There are no loafers; and you may get into boats and out of boats, into carrioles and out of carrioles, without one humpbacked beggar-boy or man with his eye in a sling to whine at you, or one officious person getting in the way in order to be paid for it. There are no mammoth hotels, where you have to climb a dozen flights of stairs before you can reach your bed; no billiards when once you have left the three chief towns; no stuffy railways to whizz you past the best scenery; no dressing for dinner.

Now, all these things, to one who has been over and over again to the most civilized places in the world, are very refreshing; and yet these are perhaps but minor points, and do not explain the secret of the great charm of Norway. Rip Van Winkle’s was a wonderful sleep; he woke and found the world had gone forward a hundred years; but the traveller who sleeps on the North Sea and wakes up in the morning in Norway has had a more wonderful sleep. He wakes and finds the world has gone back half a millennium! Southward the countries of Europe have struggled and slaved in the race for the perfection of civilization, while Norway is as it was in the beginning. Southward the countries have obeyed the watchword, “Forward!” Norway has obeyed the signal, “As you were!”

Now, fancy yourself—you, who have done as the Southerners do—arriving at a little village in an out-of-the-way place in Norway. Nobody flutters about your carriole to escort you to a hotel, but you enter the “station,” a low, rambling wooden structure, with diffidence. You see the lady of the house and shake hands with her; you ask her to be good enough to let you stay there the night; you enter a bedroom, where everything is plain as a deal box, but clean as a Dutch tulip. Then you sit down with the family in the general room to your meal. It will assuredly consist of either trout and salmon, or salmon and trout, with perhaps an egg, perhaps potatoes, perhaps black bread. No Bass, but perhaps some Norsk Öl, a very pleasant beverage. After supper you will smoke a pipe with your landlord, who will probably invite you to see the pigs, or will lend you a hand to splice up any broken harness of your carriole.

About nine or ten o’clock you will go to bed, in the broad daylight if it be summer-time, and in the morning you will wake up, finding the landlady’s daughter at your bedside, with a delicious cup of hot coffee and a natty little roll, or perchance a biscuit. And then, still early in the morning, you will bid farewell as to old friends, you will shake hands all round, and away in your carriole to drive through romantic scenery, and to feel as though Norway had been made specially for you.

Before you have been two days in the country you will love the quaint, unsophisticated people, so hearty in their kindness, so ungrudging in their hospitality, and their Old-World manners and customs, so genuine in an age of sham, so solid in an age of veneer. One great charm of Norway, then, is its people; another, and perhaps more to be appreciated by some, is its scenery.

“Is it like Switzerland?” No; Norway is only like Norway. It is not so grand as regards the height of its mountains, yet its grandeur is far more solemn. It has a dozen fjords more startling than the Lake of Lucerne; in a day’s journey you will pass waterfalls and cascades which would make a fortune to “proprietors” in Switzerland, and are not so much as mentioned in the Norwegian guide-books. Switzerland is grand beyond compare, but it must be confessed it is a monotonous grandeur. Not so with Norway: its charms of scenery are varied as they are unique. A coast wild and rugged; mighty pine-forests, interminable; lakes beautiful as Windermere; fjords awful in their grandeur; valleys rich in their fertility; fjelds bare and barren; sport with the gun, sport with the rod; these and a hundred other charms may be entered in the catalogue.

But all these are outweighed by the strange, weird beauty and grandeur of the neighborhood of the North Cape. I know of nothing that comes within the range of tourist experiences that will make a more lasting impression on the memory than a day or two in the region of the midnight sun.

For the student, the professional man, the overworked generally, and especially those whose brains are overworked, there is no tour that will be more beneficial than the one I propose briefly to sketch.