With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 4

by Unknown

Go to Christiansand. Then, if you have never been to Norway, proceed to Christiania, and, after staying a day or two in that interesting town and neighborhood, continue your journey either to Trondhjem or Bergen, it matters not which, or, better still, if you can, do both. The trip to one, the other, or both, will give you a good idea of scenery in Norway. At either Bergen or Trondhjem take the steamer for Hammerfest. And then will commence one of the most delightful voyages it is possible to make.

The steamer keeps close to the shore, and the shore is the most curious in the world; you have but to look at a map to see its wonderful indentations; you cannot realize them until you find yourself now in a bay or a cove, now among groups of islands, then in the midst of a fjord, with sheer rocks rising perpendicularly from the sea, and anon in the harbor of a little town, with groups of wondering peasantry around you. You will see some parts of the coast so wild that you cannot credit the fact that human beings can be found there, and you will find verdant nooks so peaceful and pretty that you will be tempted to think that there, away from the world, you would like to build your house and finish up your days. At one time you will come to the haunts of water-fowl innumerable; at another a shoal of whales will be around you.

The towns and villages at which you will halt will have a special charm. The curious costumes of the people; the antique architecture of their houses and churches; the good, but old-fashioned, contrivances connected with their fishing avocations,—all these will be novel.

Among the red-letter days of the trip will be a sail among the Loffoden Islands, “jagged as the jaws of a shark,” and swarming with sea-fowl; a glimpse at the neighborhood of the Maelström, so celebrated in fable; a visit to a Lapp encampment, and an occasional stroll through some of the towns at which the steamer stays. Tromsö is one of these halting-places: it is a modern town, which has grown rapidly. It was only founded in 1794, and in 1816 had but three hundred inhabitants; now, owing to the success of its herring-fishery, it has grown strangely for Norway, and has a population of over five thousand. It is charmingly situated on an island, and its rich fertility contrasts most singularly with the wildness of the surrounding mountains. Hammerfest, too, is interesting, not only because it is the most northerly town in the world, and because “in the season” it is crowded with representatives of all nations, who come here to trade, but because here you are within the limits of the region of the Midnight Sun, and from here you will take your boat (unless you continue by the Vadsö steamer) for the North Cape.

The effect of the midnight sun has been variously described. Carlyle revels in the idea that while all the nations of the earth are sleeping, you here stand in the presence of that great power which will wake them all; Bayard Taylor delights in the gorgeous coloring; and each traveller has some new poetic thought to register. For myself the midnight sun has a solemnity which nothing else in nature has. Midnight is solemn in the darkness; it is a hundredfold more solemn in the glare of sunlight, richer than ever is sun under tropical skies. It is “silence, as of death;” not the hum of a bird, not the buzz of an insect, not the distant voice of a human being. Silence palpable. You do not feel drowsy, though it is midnight; you feel a strange fear creep over you as if in a nightmare, and dare not speak; you think what if it should be true that the world is in its last sleep, and you are the last living ones, yourselves on the verge of the Eternal Ocean?

It is amusing, afterwards, to think of the way in which you landed on your excursion to the North Cape; how every one seemed impressed with the same idea that it was a sacrilege to break the silence, and the party that set forth in high spirits had settled down into the gravity of a funeral cortége. And it is strange how the stillness and awfulness, felt while in the little boat upon the silent sea, held you spellbound and entranced; and the spell could not be broken until you set to work on the difficult climb to the head of the North Cape. And when you reached the top you felt—well, I don’t know how.

To some standing on the highest part of the plateau, a thousand feet above the sea, and looking away to that great unknown Arctic Ocean, it has seemed as if they had come to the end of the earth; that they were gazing upon the confines of the eternal regions; that they saw in the distance the outlines of the land of which it is said, “There is no night there.”

Every tourist mind has its own particular magnet. I do not know what event in the history of a tourist life most attracts my memory. No one can ever forget the day when he first gazes upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives; or Damascus seen from the Mount of Mohammed; or the sunny morning when he rounds the Golden Horn, and Constantinople bursts on the view.

These are memories which never grow dim; and I am inclined to think that when a tourist finds himself in a small boat at midnight, drawing near to the North Cape in the midst of the most gorgeous sunlight ever seen, he has found a sensation which will be green in his memory to the day of his death.