the auks.[4] When the midnight sun stood large and blood-red in the sky
and cast its rosy light on the sides of the hill there came the peace
which midnight brings even in the far North. The sea was deserted; all
the birds which had been fishing and diving in it had flown up to the
berg. There they sat wherever there was room to sit in long rows of
tens, of hundreds, of hundreds of thousands, forming dazzling white
lines as all, without exception, sat facing the sea. Their ‘arr’ and
‘err’, which had deafened our ears notwithstanding the weakness of
the individual voices, were silent now, and only the roar of the surf
breaking on the rocks far below resounded as before. Not till the sun
rose again did the old bewildering bustle begin anew, and as we at
length descended the hill by the way we had climbed it, we were once
more surrounded by a thick cloud of startled birds.
It is not because of their enormous numbers alone that the auks are so
fascinating; there is much that is attractive in their life and habits.
During the brooding time their social virtues reach an extraordinary
height. Till the beginning of that season they live entirely on the
open sea, defying the severest winter and the wildest storms. Even
in the long night of winter very few of them forsake their northern
home, but they range, in flocks of hundreds and thousands, from one
fishing-ground to another, finding all the open spaces among the ice
as unfailingly as they do other promising feeding-grounds in the open
sea. But when the sun reappears they are animated by one feeling--love,
by one longing--to reach as soon as possible the hill where their
own cradle stood. Then somewhere about Easter-time they all set out,
swimming more than flying, for the bird-berg. But among the auks there
are more males than females, and not every male is fortunate enough
to secure a wife. Among other birds such a disproportion gives rise
to ceaseless strife, yet among these auks peace is not disturbed. The
much-to-be-pitied beings whom, making use of a human analogy, we may
call bachelors, migrate to the berg as well as the fortunate pairs, who
coquette and caress by the way; they fly up with these to the heights
and accompany them on their hunting expeditions to the surrounding sea.
As soon as the weather permits, the pairs begin to get the old holes
in order; they clear them out, deepen them, enlarge their chambers,
and, if necessary, hollow out a new brooding-place. As soon as this
has been done the female lays, on the bare ground at the further end
of the hollowed-out brooding-chamber, a single very large, top-shaped,
brightly-spotted egg, and begins to brood alternately with the male.
The poor bachelors have a sad time of it now. They, too, would dearly
like to take parental cares upon themselves if they could only find
a mate who would share them. But all the females are appropriated,
and wooing is in vain. So they resolve to give practical proof of
their good-will, at least in so far that they force themselves on the
fortunate pair as friends of the family. In the hours about midnight,
when the female broods on the nest, they sit with the male as he keeps
watch before it, and, when the male relieves his mate that she may
fish in the sea, they mount guard in his stead. But when both parents
visit the sea at once the bachelors hasten to reap some reward for
their faithfulness. Without delay they thrust themselves into the
interior of the cavity, and sit for the time upon the forsaken egg.
The poor birds who are condemned to celibacy want at least to brood a
little! This unselfish devotion has one result for which men might envy
the auks--there are no orphans on these bird-bergs. Should the male
of a pair come to grief, his widow immediately consoles herself with
another mate, and in the rarer case of both parents losing their lives
at once the good-natured supernumeraries are quite ready to finish
hatching the egg and to rear the young one. The young ones differ
materially from those of the ducks and gulls. They are ‘altrices’, not
‘præcoces’ as the ornithologists say;[5] in plain language, they are
not ready for active life as soon as they are hatched. In a dress of
thick gray down the young auk slips from the egg in which it awakes
to life, but it must spend many weeks in the hole before it is ready
to attempt its first flight to the sea. This first flight is always a
hazardous undertaking, as is proved by the countless dead bodies on
the cliffs at the foot of the berg. The young bird, nervously using
its unpractised legs, hardly less timidly its newly-developed wings,
follows its parents as they lead the way down the hill towards some
place from which the leap into the sea may be attempted with as little
danger as possible. On a suitable ledge the parents often remain a
long time with their young one before they can induce it to take
a spring. Both father and mother persuade it coaxingly; the little
one, usually obedient like all young birds, pays no heed to their
commands. The father throws himself into the sea before the eyes of
his hesitating offspring; the inexperienced young one remains where he
was. More attempts, more coaxing, urgent pressure: at length he risks
the great leap and plunges like a falling stone deep into the sea;
then, unconsciously obeying his instincts, he works his way to the
surface, looks all around over the unending sea, and--is a sea-bird who
thenceforth shuns no danger.
Different again is the life and activity on the bergs chosen as
brooding-places by the kittiwakes. Such a hill is the promontory
Swärtholm, high up in the north between the Laxen and the Porsanger
fjord, not far from the North Cape. I knew well how these gulls appear
on their brooding-places. Faber, with his excellent knowledge of the
birds of the far North, has depicted it, as usual, in a few vivid words:
“They hide the sun when they fly, they cover the skerries when they
sit, they drown the thunder of the surf when they cry, they colour the
rocks white when they brood.” I believed the excellent Faber after I
had seen the eider-holms and auk-bergs, and yet I doubted, as every
naturalist must, and therefore I ardently desired to visit Swärtholm
for myself. An amiable Norseman with whom I became friendly, the pilot
of the mail steamer by which I travelled, readily agreed to row me
over to the breeding-place, and we approached the promontory late one
evening. At a distance of six or eight nautical miles we were overtaken
by flocks of from thirty to a hundred, sometimes even two hundred
kittiwakes flying to their nesting-place. The nearer we approached to
Swärtholm the more rapid was the succession of these swarms, and the
larger did they become. At last the promontory became visible, a rocky
wall about eight hundred yards long, pierced by innumerable holes,
rising almost perpendicularly from the sea to a height of from four
hundred and fifty to six hundred feet. It looked gray in the distance,
but with a telescope one could discern innumerable points and lines.
It looked as though a gigantic slate had been scratched all over with
all sorts of marks by a playful giant child, as though the whole rock
bore a wondrous decoration of chains, rings, and stars. From the dark
depths of large and small cavities there gleamed a brilliant white; the
shelving ledges stood out in more conspicuous brightness. The brooding
gulls on their nests formed the white pattern, and we realized the
truth of Faber’s words, “they cover the rocks when they sit”.
[Illustration: Fig. 4.--Razor-bills.]
Our boat, as it grated on the rocky shore, startled a number of the
gulls, and I saw a picture such as I had seen on many eider-holms
and gull-islands. A shot from my friend’s gun thundered against
the precipice. As a raging winter storm rushes through the air and
breaks up the snow-laden clouds till they fall in flakes, so now it
snowed living birds. One saw neither hill nor sky, nothing but an
indescribable confusion. A thick cloud darkened the whole horizon,
justifying the description “they hide the sun when they fly”. The north
wind blew violently and the icy sea surged wildly against the foot of
the cliffs, but more loudly still resounded the shrill cries of the
birds, so that the truth of the last part also of Faber’s description
was fully proved, “they drown the thunder of the surf when they cry”.
At length the cloud sank down upon the sea, the hitherto dim outlines
of Swärtholm became distinct again, and a new spectacle enchained our
gaze. On the precipices there seemed to sit quite as many birds as
before, and thousands were still flying up and down. A second shot
scared new flocks, a second time it snowed birds down upon the sea,
and still the hillsides were covered with hundreds of thousands.
But on the sea, as far as the eye could reach, lay gulls like light
foam-balls rocking up and down with the waves. How shall I describe the
magnificent spectacle? Shall I say that the sea had woven millions and
millions of bright pearls into her dark wave-robe? Or shall I compare
the gulls to stars; and the ocean to the dome of heaven? I know not;
but I know that I have seen nothing more gorgeous even on the sea.
And as if the charm were not already great enough, the midnight sun,
erewhile clouded over, suddenly shed its rosy light over promontory and
sea and birds, lighting up every wave-crest as if a golden, wide-meshed
net had been thrown over the water, and making the rose-tinted
dazzling gulls appear more brilliant than before. We stood speechless
at the sight! And we, with all our company, even the sailors of our
boat, remained motionless for a long, long time, deeply moved by the
wonderful picture before us, till at last one of us broke the silence,
and, rather to recover himself through the sound of his own voice than
to express his inner feeling, softly uttered the poet’s words:
Over the bergs the sun blood-red
Shone through the night;
Nor day nor dark was over head,
But weird twilight.
THE TUNDRA AND ITS ANIMAL LIFE.
Around the North Pole lies a broad belt of inhospitable land, a desert
which owes its special character rather to the water than to the sun.
Towards the Pole this desert gradually loses itself in fields of ice,
towards the south in dwarfed woods, becoming itself a field of snow
and ice when the long winter sets in, while stunted trees attempt the
struggle for existence only in the deepest valleys or on the sunniest
slopes. This region is the Tundra.[6]
It is a monotonous picture which I attempt to sketch when I seek to
describe the tundra, a picture gray on gray, yet not devoid of all
beauty; it is a desert with which we have to do, but a desert in which
life, though for many months slumbering and apparently banished, stirs
periodically in wondrous fulness.
Our language possesses no synonym for the word tundra, because our
Fatherland possesses no such tract of country. For the tundra is
neither heath nor moor, neither marsh nor fen, neither highlands nor
sand-dunes, neither moss nor morass, though in many places it may
resemble one or other of these. “Moss-steppes” someone has attempted
to name it, but the expression is only satisfactory to those who have
grasped the idea of steppe in its widest sense. In my opinion the
tundra most resembles one of those moors which we find--and avoid--on
the broad saddles of our lofty mountains; but it differs in many and
important respects even from these boggy plateaus; indeed its character
is in every respect unique. The region is sometimes divided into low
and high tundra, though the differences between the land under three
hundred feet above sea-level and that above this line are in the tundra
more apparent than real.
The low tundra is bounded by flat, wavy outlines; its valleys are
shallow troughs, and even the heights, which, from a distance, look
like hills or even mountains, turn out to be only flat hillocks when
one approaches their base. Flatness, uniformity, expressionlessness
prevail, yet that there is a certain variety in the landscape, a
diversity in some of its individual features, cannot be disputed. As
one wanders through the tundra for days at a time, one’s attention
is often arrested by dainty, even charming little pictures, but such
pictures rarely stamp themselves on the memory, since on closer
examination they prove, in all important details, in setting and
surroundings, in contour and colour, like too many other scenes to
make a distinct impression. Notwithstanding this monotony, the general
aspect of the tundra has little unity, still less grandeur, and on this
account one does not become enthusiastic about the region, does not
reach to the heights of emotion which other landscapes awaken, perhaps
does not even attain to full enjoyment of the real beauties which, it
must be admitted, even this desert possesses.
The tundra receives its greatest beauty from the sky, its greatest
charm from the water. The sky is seldom quite clear and bright, though
even here the sun, shining uninterruptedly for months together, can
beat down hot and oppressive on the flat hills and damp valleys. The
blue sky is usually seen only in isolated places through light, white,
loose-layered clouds; these are often massed together into cloud-banks
which form on all sides of the apparently immeasurable horizon,
continually changing, shifting, assuming new forms, appearing and
vanishing again, so ravishing the eye with their changeful brilliance
that one almost forgets the landscape underneath. When a thunder-storm
threatens after a hot day the sky darkens here and there to the deepest
gray-blue, the vapour-laden clouds sink beneath the lighter ones,
and the sun shines through, clear and brilliant; then the dreary,
monotonous landscape is magically beautified. For light and shade
now diversify the hill-tops and valleys, and the wearisome monotony
of their colour gains variety and life. And when, in the middle of a
midsummer night, the sun stands large and blood-red in the heavens,
when all the clouds are flushed with purple from beneath, when those
hill-tops which hide the luminary bear a far-reaching flaming crown of
rays, when a delicate rosy haze lies over the brown-green landscape,
when, in a word, the indescribable magic of the midnight sun casts its
spell over the soul: then this wilderness is transformed into enchanted
fields, and a blissful awe fills the heart.
[Illustration: Fig. 5.--The High Tundra in Northern Siberia.]
But variety and life are also given by the jewels of the tundra--its
innumerable lakes. Distributed singly or in groups, lying beside
or rising above each other, stretching out into water-basins miles in
breadth, or shrinking into little pools, they occupy the centre of
every hollow, beautify every valley, almost every glen, sparkle in
the all-enlivening sunshine, and gray and colourless though they may
be, assume, if seen from the top of a hill, the deep blue of mountain
lakes. And when the sunlight flashes and twinkles on their mirroring
waves, or when they, too, are touched by the rosy glow of midnight,
they stand out from the surrounding gloom like living lights, on which
the eye delights to linger.
Much grander, though still gloomy and monotonous, is the spectacle
presented by the high tundra. Here the mountains--for such they
are--have all the charms of height. They almost always rise
precipitously, and the chains they form have much-broken lines, and in
all suitable places the snowy sheets which cover them become glaciers.
Tundra in the strict sense is only to be found where the water does
not find rapid outlet; the whole remaining country seems so different
from the low grounds that only the essentially similar vegetation
proclaims it tundra. The boulders, which in the low grounds are
turfed over with thick layers of dead plant remains, are here almost
everywhere exposed; endless heaps of gigantic blocks cover the slopes
and fill the valleys; boulders form the substratum of wide, almost flat
surfaces on which the traveller treads hesitatingly, as he ponders
over the difficult riddle regarding the forces which have distributed
the blocks over these vast surfaces with almost unvarying regularity.
But everywhere between them the water trickles and glides, ripples and
swells, rushes and roars, rages and thunders down to the low ground.
From the slopes it flows in trickling threads, converging runlets, and
murmuring brooklets; from the crevices of the glaciers it breaks forth
in milky torrents; it enters the water-basins in turbid rivulets; it
escapes from the purifying lakes in crystalline streams, and whirling
and foaming, hissing and raging, it hurries onwards down the valleys,
forming alternate waterfalls and whirlpools, till it reaches the low
tundra, a river, or the sea. But the sun, as often as it breaks through
the clouds, floods this unique mountain region also with its magic
colours, defines every hill and valley, illumines every snowfield,
makes every glacier and ravine conspicuous and telling, gives effect to
every peak, ridge and cliff, shows every lake as a clear and smiling
mountain eye, spreads, morning and evening, the blue haze of distance
like a delicate veil over the background of the picture, and, at
midnight, floods the whole with its deepest rays, so that it is bathed
in rosy light. Surely even the tundra is not without its charms.
In some places, though very rarely, the vegetation gives a certain form
and beauty to the scenery. Pines and firs, if not altogether confined
to the south, are only to be found in the most sheltered valleys. The
few firs which are to be seen look as if they had been seized by a
giant hand and twisted like a screw, and they do not thrive in the
higher districts. The birches penetrate farther, but even they are
stunted and bent like grizzled dwarfs. The larches alone here and
there hold the field, and grow to be really trees, but they cannot be
described as characteristic of the tundra. The most characteristic
plant is certainly the dwarf-birch. Only under exceptionally favourable
circumstances attaining to a yard in height, it predominates over by
far the greater part of the tundra so absolutely that all other bushes
and shrubs seem only to have sprung up between the birches. It spreads
over all tracts where it can take root, from the shore of the sea or
river to the tops of the mountains, a more or less thick covering so
equal in height that great stretches look as if they had been shorn
along the top; it recedes only where the ground is so soaked with water
that it forms swamp or morass; it is stunted only where the heights are
covered with infertile quartz or with stiff clay, which hardens readily
in the sun; but it strives for mastery with the bog-moss on all the
low grounds and with the reindeer-moss on every height. Areas of many
square miles are so thickly clothed--one might almost say felted--that
only the indestructible bog-moss ventures to assert its claim to
the soil beside, or rather under the birches. In other less moist
places we find dwarf-birches, sweet-willow, and marsh-andromeda mixed
together. In the same way various berry-bearing bushes are often mixed,
especially cowberries, crowberries, cranberries, and whortleberries.
If the ground lies below the level of the surrounding plains, and
is therefore very moist, the bog-moss gains the day, and, gradually
crowding out the dwarf-birch, forms great swelling cushions. As the
root-parts rapidly die away into peat, these cushions become higher
and more extensive until the water impedes any further advance, or
else they break up into dome-like hillocks. If the basin be very flat,
the accumulated water rarely forms a lake or pond, scarcely even a
pool, but soaks through the soil to an indefinite depth, and so forms
a morass whose thin but tough covering of interlacing sedge-roots can
only be trodden in safety by the broad-hoofed reindeer; and even his
steps, and the deeply-sinking runners of the sledge, make it yield and
tremble like jelly.
When the depression becomes a short confined trough, without outlet,
into which a streamlet flows, however slowly, the morass becomes a
bog, or lower down, a swamp. In the first of these, reeds, in the
second downy willows (sallows), a second characteristic plant of the
tundra, attain to luxuriant growth. Though only in very favourable
circumstances becoming as tall as a man, these plants form thickets
which may be literally impenetrable. Their branches and roots interlace
to an even greater extent than do those of the dwarf-firs on the
mountains, forming an inextricable maze which can best be compared
to a felt compacted out of all the different parts of the willow. It
withstands the strongest arm, when one tries to clear a path through
it, and it offers so much obstruction to the foot that the most
persistent explorer soon gives up the attempt to pierce it, and turns
aside, or retraces his steps. This he does the more readily as the
substratum is in most cases morass or an almost continuous series of
marshy, slimy pools whose fathomableness one is unwilling even to try.
As the traveller journeys through the tundra, he recognizes that the
whole region presents to the eye the individual features already
described, in regular alternation and monotonous repetition. Only where
a large river of considerable volume flows through the low tundra is
there any real change. Such a river deposits on its banks the masses
of sand it has carried down; and the wind, which blows constantly and
usually violently, piles these gradually up into dunes along the
banks; thus a soil foreign to the tundra is formed. On these sand-hills
the larch grows, even in the tundra of Siberia, to a stately tree,
and becomes, in association with willows and dwarf alder bushes, an
ornament to the landscape. In the neighbourhood of small lakes the
trees may even be grouped together, and, with the shrubs already named,
form a natural park which would not escape observation even in a much
richer and more fertile district, and is here so very remarkable that
it leaves a lasting impression.
[Illustration: Fig. 6.--Peregrine Falcons and Lemmings.]
When the larch has taken root in the sand-hills, there grow up under
its sheltering branches other tall-stemmed plants such as sharp-leaved
willows, mountain ash, black alder, and woodbine bushes, and there
spring from the sand many flowers which one thought to have left far
behind in the south. The surprised southerner is cheered by the red
glory of the willow-herb; the charming wild rose clings close to the
motherly earth, decorating it with its slender stems and its flowers;
the bright forget-me-not looks up with home-like greeting; here
hellebore and chives, valerian and thyme, carnations and blue-bells,
bird-vetch and alpine vetch, ranunculus and immortelles, lady’s-smock,
Jacob’s-ladder, cinquefoil, love-lies-bleeding, and others find a home
in the desert. In such places more plants grow than one had expected,
but the traveller is certainly modest in his expectations when he has
seen the same poverty all around for days and weeks together, always
dwarf-birches and sallows, marsh-andromeda and sedge, reindeer-moss
and bog-moss; has refreshed himself with the stunted crowberries and
cranberries half-hidden in the moss, half-creeping on the ground,
and has been obliged to take the cloudberries which decorate the
moss-cushion as flowers; when he has tramped over them and among
them for days together always hoping for a change, and always being
disappointed. Every familiar plant from the south reminds him of
happier regions; he greets it as a dear friend whose value is only
realized when he has begun to fear losing him.[7]