Through Arctic Lapland
_By the same Author._
THE RECIPE FOR DIAMONDS.
HONOUR OF THIEVES.
THE PARADISE COAL-BOAT.
ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN KETTLE.
[Illustration: RINGING A BEAR TRACK _p. 94_]
Through
Arctic Lapland
BY
CUTCLIFFE HYNE
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1898
TO
MRS. ALFRED HARMSWORTH
OUR FRIEND
C. H.
C. J. C. H.
Preface
It seems customary in a book of travel to make frequent
allusions to other voyagers who have journeyed over the same
ground, or at least the same district, and to make constant
references to them, and give copious quotations from their
works. Of course we ought to have gone to the British Museum
before starting on our travel, and there read up all books
which in the least bore upon the country which we were going
to visit. We omitted to do this, firstly, because we
preferred to observe things for ourselves, from our own
individual standpoint, unprejudiced by the way in which
other people had observed them; and, secondly, from the far
more potent reason that we made our actual start in a great
hurry, and had little enough time for any preparations
whatever.
However, on our return to England we thought well to check
the information we had garnered. So we duly provided
ourselves with readers' tickets for that institution, and
went to the British Museum Library, and got down every book
which seemed in any way to bear upon the country we had
wandered over, regardless of the tongue in which it was
written. It was a surprise to us to learn (and may we add
that the surprise was not without its pleasant savour?) that
of all the volumes in that collection not one covered the
route which we took during summer through Arctic Lapland.
Many had gone near it, from a gentleman of bygone date who
wrote in Latin, to Mr. Paul du Chaillu, who chats about the
larger part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. But we seemed to
have stumbled across the one bit of Europe which has not
been pilloried on paper at one time or another, and so we
here venture to take up a couple of note-books which were
originally made for personal gratification, and amplify them
into a volume of letterpress and sketches which may haply
interest others.
Contents
CHAPTER I
PAGE
LONDON TO VARDÖ, WITH A FEW EXAMPLES OF HOW
PLANS MAY BE CHANGED 1
CHAPTER II
ACROSS THE VARANGER TO ELVENAES, WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS
ON THE FISHING OF THE FINNER WHALE,
AND A NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS WITH A JEW 19
CHAPTER III
BY CANOE TO THE NEIDEN, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE RUSSIAN
LAPPS' DAUBSFEST AT BORIS GLEB 38
CHAPTER IV
FROM THE NEIDEN ELV TO ENARE SEE, WITH PUNGENT
COMMENT ON THE HABITS OF FINNISH CARRIERS 52
CHAPTER V
ENARE SEE TO ENARE TOWN IN A SQUARE-SAIL VIKING
SHIP 76
CHAPTER VI
INTO THE LAND OF HORRIBLE FLIES: A NARRATIVE OF
PERSONALLY-CONDUCTED TRAVEL 98
CHAPTER VII
INTO THE LAND OF HORRIBLE FLIES--_Continued_ 133
CHAPTER VIII
IN TOUCH WITH THE GENUINE NOMAD, WITH SOME REMARKS
UPON HIS DOMESTIC DEER, HIS TREASURE-HOARDS,
AND THE DECAY OF HIS PRACTICE IN SORCERY 147
CHAPTER IX
A _PRÉCIS_ OF LAPPISH HISTORY, AND A NARRATIVE OF
TRANSIT BY RAFT AND SWAMP TO IVALOMATI 167
CHAPTER X
ON TO POKKA, WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO PRINCE JOHANN
OF LAPLAND 190
CHAPTER XI
THE WORST MARCHES OF ALL 213
CHAPTER XII
DOWN THE RAPIDS TO KITTILA TOWN 239
CHAPTER XIII
THROUGH TO THE SEA: A PROGRESS IN POST-CARTS, WITH
INTERLUDES OF RIVER-FERRIES 257
[Illustration: Log Track across Swamp]
_Note._--River in Norsk is Elv; in Qfensk, Joki. Lake in
Qfensk is Järvi. J is pronounced as Y.
List of Illustrations
FACING PAGE
Ringing a Bear Track _Frontispiece_
Midnight among the Lofötens 4
Vardö Harbour 8
Towing Home Finner Whales 22
The Gates of Russian Lapland 30
Daubsfest at Boris Gleb 42
Finn Carriers crossing Russian Frontier 58
A Lakeside Camp on Enare See 82
Bear Hunt--Smoking him out 96
The Signal Fire 110
A Prosperous Lapp Settlement 118
Herder Lapps' Encampment 152
Raft wrecked on the Repojoki 186
Johann's Acrobatic Failure 208
On the Way to Kittila 249
Arctic Lapland Types 256
_Pen and Ink Vignettes at end of Chapters_
PAGE
Log Track across Swamp xi
The _Windward_ 18
Deep-sea Fishing 37
Feodor and Morris--two Skolte Lapps 51
Viking Boats on Enare See 97
Sketches at Menesjärvi 132
Smoking out Mosquitoes 146
The Sorcerer and the Portrait 166
Marie, the Sorcerer's Daughter 189
Drinking Cups 256
Reindeer Horns 284
Map showing Route _Facing page_ 284
Through Arctic Lapland
CHAPTER I
LONDON TO VARDÖ, WITH A FEW EXAMPLES OF HOW
PLANS MAY BE CHANGED
The wharves of Katherine Dock were black with many thousands of people,
and all their eyes converged on a little auxiliary barque which was
working out of the basin under her own gentle steam. The barque carried
a white tub at her mainmast-head, was rigged with single topsails, bore
many white double-ended boats upturned on skids amidships, and was
decorated with sundry other matters which even to the shore eye would
seem strange in London river. Stacked in her waist were bags of coal,
crates, packing cases, a couple of ice-anchors, a tangle of trellis-work
sledges, and other quaint trifles which had not yet been struck below.
Any craft more unlike the ordinary conventional type of yacht it would
have been hard to conceive, and yet the burgee of the Royal Thames Yacht
Club fluttered out from above the white crow's nest (or fouled the
telescope rail, as the case might be) and an English blue ensign hung
clean and unfrayed from the mizzen truck, as the mizzen gaff, its more
orthodox station, had not yet been set up.
The barque was already a vessel well known. As a sealer and whale-fisher
she had earned fat dividends for Dundee owners; as the _S.Y. Windward_
she had made history, and helped to found the British colony of Elmwood
in Franz Josef's Land, and had been iced up for an Arctic winter in a
bay at the back of Cape Flora; and on this trip she was destined
(although no one even guessed at it then) to acquire a far more
international fame. She was setting out then from Katherine Dock under
the command of that old ice-sailor, Captain James Brown, to carry
recruits and supplies to the Jackson-Harmsworth exploring expedition
after their second winter amongst the polar ice; and she landed these on
the sterile rocks of Franz Josef's Land after a bitter struggle with the
floes, and brought back with her to the land of champagne and telegraph
wires, Frithjof Nansen, the Norskman, as by this time all the world most
thoroughly knows.
Slowly that single-topsail barque was warped across the dock basin, a
strange small creature amongst the huge steam shipping; slowly she
passed through the outer lock; and then the ebb of the muddy river took
her, and she moved out into the stream, and the black crowds on the
dock-head sent up thunderous cheers.
The little auxiliary propeller fluttered astern, and she dropped down
river at no ostentatious speed. But the white barrel perched up there
under the main truck betrayed her always, and every vessel of every
nationality in those cosmopolitan reaches knew her as the yacht of the
English Arctic expedition. The blue ensign was kept on a constant dance
up and down from her mizzen truck, as it answered other bunting, which
was dipped in salute from countless peaks and poop-staffs. Some crews
cheered her as she passed at her puny gait through the crowded shipping;
the band of the _Worcester_ played her down the river out of earshot;
everybody she passed warmed to her enterprise and wished her success and
a snug return.
Ladies, and owner, and shore folk, had come down the river to give her a
final "send off," but these left at Greenhythe with the mud pilot, and
from that began an easy voyage to the rim of the Polar Sea. The
_Windward_ was to go North as much as possible under her own canvas; but
as some steam would certainly be required for head winds and other
emergencies, she was to call in at Vardö at the entrance to the White
Sea to rebunker, so as to have the largest possible supply of good Welsh
steam coal for her final battle with the Northern ice. To this port, in
the north-easternmost angle of Arctic Norway, the _Windward_ carried as
passengers Mr. Cecil Hayter, who drew pictures for this book, and
another man, who wrote it.
Now, to say that we two had a vague notion of what was ahead of us was
putting the matter mildly. We knew many of those concerned in the
Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, and had always had an interest in the
achievements of the _Windward_; and one night in somebody's
billiard-room we had talked vaguely over "going North and doing
something up there" ourselves. We imagined this something might be to
explore the Petchora or one of the lesser-known Northern Siberian
rivers, to make the acquaintance of the Samoyede in his native _choom_,
and incidentally to do some big game shooting. We knew remarkably little
about the country, and so were quite unfettered in making some very
appetising plans. This was six months before the _Windward_ sailed, and
though we met two or three times in the interval, the matter was only
mentioned casually, and with merely a dilettante interest.
Finally, when Mr. Alfred Harmsworth wired "Are you going North with
_Windward_?" and got a simultaneous reply of "Delighted" from each of
us, the yacht was booked to sail in fifty hours' time, and any
preparations we wished to make were naturally hustled.
[Illustration: MIDNIGHT AMONG THE LOFÖTENS.]
When we actually did get under weigh, our outfit consisted of one
inferior double-barrelled 12-bore shot-gun by an anonymous maker, one
good Marlin '45 repeating rifle carrying a long bullet, a small
assortment of tinned foods and loaded cartridges, an imaginative map,
the clothes we stood up in, and a brown canvas, seaman's bag apiece
containing sleeping sack, tooth-brush, spare shirt, and foreign office
passport with a hieroglyphical Russian _visé_. But if our equipment was
slender, the plan of our expedition was at least definite and concise.
The Petchora and North Siberia were to be left undisturbed in their
accustomed darkness. Even the virgin delights of Novaya Zemblya (to
which island a steamer was alleged to be on the point of starting from
Archangel) were to be left for another time. We were going to see the
Lapp in that unmeddled-with country, Arctic Lapland.
It had been my luck to live _en famille_ with some herder Lapps once
before in North-Western Norway. I had some elk shooting and some fishing
up there, and I came across the tribe one day poaching red char from one
of my own hired lakes. I kept silence about my temporary proprietorship,
and assisted to steal my own fish, after which I encamped with them for
seven days, sleeping _à la belle étoile_, and providing my own
nutriment. The tribe possessed some three hundred head of tame reindeer,
and as my available luggage at the time was a Kodak camera, I managed to
get some rather good photographs of the deer at close quarters.
It was these photographs which suggested going to see the Lapp in his
own domains. The map showed the position of Lapland in large letters,
and for the sake of definiteness we made up our minds to cross it from
north to south, and take to the seas again at the head of the Gulf of
Bothnia. That should be our expedition. It was delightfully simple in
its scope and comprehensiveness.
Drawing from our own ignorance, and from the united ignorance of others
(most freely and generously bestowed), we mapped out the details of the
campaign with glibness and ease. At Vardö we were to purchase furs to
wear and horses to ride. Russian horses, or rather ponies, they were to
be: our friends told us all about them. And then we had merely to
procure a guide and interpreter, and set off. There was a road along the
north shore of the Varanger fjord to Vadsö, and from there a bridle path
of sorts led to Næsseby and Puolnak, and down through the country by
Lake Enare to Kittila, where it met a broad road which continued down by
the side of the Torneo River as far as the coast. We knew all this
because the large scale map which we bought at the best map shop in
London said it was so. And there were plenty of villages--the map marked
them with clearness and precision. At nights we would either sleep out
in our furs and blanket sacks, or sleep in the villages.
As regards the commissariat, that we decided would be simple also.
Reindeer meat, salmon, rye bread, milk, cheese, and butter would be
always procurable from the natives. And besides, we should shoot far
more game than we could possibly use for the pot. Men who "knew the
country round there" assured us clearly on this point. Game swarmed. The
country was alive with bear, ptarmigan, willow grouse, and capercailzie.
I wonder now that no one suggested we might pick up a belated mammoth.
And though I personally had been shooting in North Norway before, and so
discounted part of the yarns, I did think we should find enough to keep
going upon.
The few tins of provisions we did take were mainly to serve as luxuries.
For instance, we had quite a large supply of _foie gras_ and larks in
aspic.
I had a vivid recollection of how the last tin of that _pâté de foie
gras_ went. We had put in a forty-mile tramp by way of sharpening the
appetite, and we sat down in the middle of a gray cloud of mosquitoes to
share it between us. It was a tin about four inches in diameter by two
deep, and it contained a generous casing of tallow, which had partly
melted through being carried next to a perspiring Laplander's back.
There was no scrap of any other food available, and so we divided the
_pâté_ (and the tallow) with mathematical accuracy. Hayter eyed the
polished tin when we had finished, and said thoughtfully that he always
had liked _foie gras_. I mentioned that sometimes I preferred beef or
even venison; that I could do with about six pounds of beef just then;
and that as a meal for a hungry man, _foie gras_ was all very well, but
did not seem to go quite far enough.
With these hints, then, at our initial ignorance of what lay beyond, let
me pass on to Vardö, which was the real starting-point of both our plans
and our journey. The _Windward_ made an easy voyage of it on the whole
up to there, and although she carried away her main-topsail yard, and
smashed the reefing spar below it in two places, that was looked upon as
rather a slice of luck, as it might well have been disastrous if such an
accident had happened later, when every ounce of steam and every inch of
canvas might be wanted in the fierce wrestle with the Polar ice. In
Vardö it might be repaired.
[Illustration: VARDÖ HARBOUR.]
Inside Vardö harbour walls, then, to a mooring we came, and the smells
of the place closed round us and took possession. Bobbling about on the
harbour swell around us were some two hundred vessels of strange
Northern rig, and almost all connected with the trade in fish. There is
no agriculture in this town perched on the northern outskirts of the
continent; there are no trees to make a timber business; there are no
metals or fuels to dig from the earth; there are no inducements to weave
or carry on any of the manufactures of a more gentle clime. The sea is
the only field which yields the Vardö man a harvest, and from the sea he
reaps it with unremitting industry. Finns, Russians, Norwegians,
Samoyedes, Lapps, all join in the work and bring their catch, in clumsy
yots, and square-sailed viking boats, and the other weird unhandy craft
of the North, in past the concrete wall of Vardö harbour, and run
alongside the smelling warehouses which are built on piles at the
water-side, and send it ashore all slimy and glistening, and then go off
to dangle bait in the chill inhospitable seas for more.
The men of the town, and the women, gut the fish, and leave the entrails
to rot in the streets, or under the wharfs, or in the harbour water; and
then the carcasses are carried to the outskirts of the town, and hung on
endless racks of wood to shrivel, and dry, and scent the air as
thoroughly as the rains of the climate will permit. At the corner posts
hang posies of cods' heads to serve as fodder for the cows and goats
during the winter, and these too help to amplify the stink. And from the
mainland, beyond the fort, when the breezes blow Vardö-wards, there
drift across more forceful stinks from the factory where they flense the
Finner whales, and try down the blubber into oil, and cut up the pink
beef for canned meats and fodder for the Arctic cow.
In the harbour, steamers from France, and Hamburg, and lower Norway,
load bales of the dried cod, which will carry the aroma of Vardö as far
as Bremen, Brest, and St. Petersburg.
As wooden places go, the town itself is not uncomely. It is built on an
island, which is nearly cut in two by the fjords that form the harbour,
and it has two principal streets running at right angles to one another,
and others again branching off these. The houses are of all colours
from ochre to gray, and all sizes, and all architectures. There are
roses and stocks and geraniums showing from behind the windows. The
older roofs are green with grass, and dotted with the flowers of
buttercup and clover. Some are roofed with turf alone. Goats feed on the
roofs, and ladders lead up to them, so that the owners can pull off
burning rafters in case of a fire. There are goats in the streets too,
snuffling amongst the disused fish.
Once the town was a strong place, but the star-shaped fort, which was
built in 1735, is to-day obsolete, though field-guns and some
breech-loaders on slides still grin through the embrasures, and the
garrison of fifteen men take it in orderly turns to hoist the Norwegian
flag. The racks of drying fish carcasses run along the side of its ramp,
and bristling nosegays of cods' heads dangle on either side of its main
entrance.
There are other towns of Norway given up to the cult of the cod, but
nowhere is it so entirely the one staple of commerce as in this ancient
settlement so far within the Arctic Circle. The tail of the Gulf Stream
keeps its climate equable. It is never very hot and never very cold, and
in this it differs vastly from the interior of the continent to the
southward, where both extremes prevail; and if it has to put up with a
six months' night in the winter of the year, with only a slight
lightening of the gloom at midday to tell that the sun is still
somewhere in the universe to keep the world a-move, at the same time it
has another six months when all lamps can be dismantled and put away,
and day burns high all round the clock and round again.
But the summer is the time when commerce bristles. It is then that the
larger merchants toil to make their wealth; and when the lamps begin to
kindle in the windows, they take the mail steamers and go away to follow
the retiring sun. Some merely retreat to Tromsö, some to Bergen, some to
Petersburg; but there are others who go to Italy and Southern Europe;
and there is one who washes the cod-stink from him, and dons the garb of
fashion, and winter after winter hies him to a tiny principality on the
Riviera, where they keep a roulette bank, which it is his mood to try
and break. The gambling rooms down there are cosmopolitan, certainly,
but I wonder how many people have guessed that they usually contain a
stock-fish prince who gets his wealth from the chilly Polar sea?
Now Vardö was not what we had come so far to see, or smell. We wanted to
get started on our travel in Arctic Lapland as quickly as might be; and
as soon as the whale-boat had set us ashore amongst the fish litter on
one of the wharves, we set about pushing inquiries as far as they would
go.
The success we met with in this pursuit was not brilliant. In fact the
results might be catalogued as almost entirely negative.
In the first instance the horse-bubble was pricked once and for all.
Lapland, it appeared, was largely made up of swamps and lakes and
rivers, and we were gravely informed that the horse was not a navigable
animal. If we wanted to get through, we must walk and wade where that
was possible, and canoe or raft the rest; and it was suggested that if
we wished to ensure success, we had better in addition borrow two pairs
of good reliable wings to help us. Anything we wished to take with us
must be borne about our own persons or carried on the backs of hired
men. And this was about all the definite information we could arrive at.
The cause of the deficit was simple: during the summer months,
communication across the interior was entirely interrupted, and Vardö
could not be expected to know much about a journey which was never done.
In winter, when the snow crust hardened, and the rivers and the lakes
were roofed with massive ice, then movement about the country was a
comparatively easy thing. There were recognised routes, and the
traveller could pack himself into one of the boat-like, reindeer
sledges, and move along over the frozen surface at from six to ten miles
per hour, and be sure of relays of deer at certain appointed stations.
But in summer the deer were away deep in the fjelds, fattening on the
ivory-yellow moss; they were useless to travel with through swamps and
across deep open water, and the mosquitoes would have maddened them if
they had been tried; and, in consequence, the natives of the interior
bowed to the inevitable. They just stayed in their farms, or their
fishing-camps, or their herd-stations, and worked during the brief
summer months to store up food against the long grim frozen night of
winter.
At first, then, it was pointed out to us that we were proposing to do an
impossibility, and it was suggested that we should either wait in Vardö
till the snows came and sledges could be used, or abandon the Lapland
expedition and go off to explore the Petchora, or visit that
fascinatingly unknown island, Novaya Zemblya. We quite saw the charm of
these two last alternatives, and made arrangements for riving the
secrets from Novaya Zemblya some other season, and thinning its flocks
of deer and polar bears, and charting the Matoskin Skyar; but for the
present Lapland was what our souls hankered after, and we had got to get
there somehow.
It is not to be denied, though, that the Novaya Zemblya scheme had its
seductions. There was in Vardö harbour a weird, clumsy craft of the type
locally known as "yot," which had visited that island a-many times with
a crew of hunters. She had two masts with a square sail (not lug)
hoisting on each, and her best point of sailing was more or less before
the wind. With the wind anywhere ahead, she just had to run into
shelter, or drift, till the breeze chose to veer again. She had no
notion whatever of ratching to windward, and was not addicted to making
certain or rapid passages. That summer she was laid up. During the
previous summer (having sailed in the spring) she had gone out to the
Kara Strait, and then pushed up along the Western Novaya Zemblyan coast,
following the line of drift-ice as it retreated north. She had an ample
crew on board, and these made short expeditions inshore, taking with
them powder and shot, and bringing back deer skins and deer meat. They
seldom went far inland from the coast, for fear lest the clumsy "yot"
should be blown off in some sudden gale, and they would be left without
means of retreat; and they went for the commercial business of
meat-hunting alone, just as their fellows hunted the seas for fish; and
when their holds were full of venison and peltries, it was a case of
'bout-ship with them, and back to Vardö again as fast as they could
drive her.
We could not find that any of these hunters had so much as shut the eye
of sleep upon the island. Samoyedes were alleged to reside there
permanently, shifting their _chooms_ from point to point as the struggle
for a lean subsistence prompted; and in the south there certainly was a
Russian colony in the leading strings of the Government of Archangel,
and visited once a year by an erratic steamer. But, as I say, the great
bulk of the island was _terra incognita_; there was no reason why it
should be exceptionally impassable; and there was every cause to expect
that it would be plentifully rambled over by fowl of all sorts--and
possibly the great auk, who knew?--and graciously blessed in the matter
of four-footed big game.
The charm of the Arctic (which must be felt to be understood) had got us
well in tow, and we licked our lips over the thought of this unknown
isle, and drunk up all available yarns concerning it, and made
exhaustive plans to explore it in the not very distant future. But we
did not allow this mere flirtation to seduce us away from the more
immediate business of the present. Lapland was what we wanted, and it
was on schemes for crossing Lapland at which we hammered with
unremitting industry.
At last, after much pressing, it was admitted that we might possibly
find carriers for our transport at the other side of the Varanger fjord,
but at the same time it was pointed out that we probably should not. At
any rate the route from Puolnak was utterly impracticable. Our only
chance was to start from the Neiden Elv, cross from there to Enare See,
boat that, and then trust to luck. Provisions, we were told plainly, it
was most unlikely we should find, but (so absolutely ignorant were these
Vardö people of the interior of Lapland) the prospects of sport were
said to be extremely rosy. There were few bear or other big game, to be
sure, but the gun would provide us with fowl in all abundance for the
pot. And, anyway, it was entirely useless to further recruit our slender
stock of tins. It was vastly improbable that we should be able to get
carriers for the few we had got. It was more than likely that we should
have to desert them, and press on alone with merely cartridges as
personal luggage, if we were fools enough to try and travel through
country at that season where it was not intended by Nature that man
should go.
Now this information was none of it very encouraging, and none of it
very definite. It was most of it frankly given as depending on mere
hearsay. And although we advertised our want largely, and tramped up and
down the fish-strewn streets to see countless likely people, nowhere
could we find a man who knew Lapland personally, much less one who would
(for a fee) act as guide, much less one who could serve as guide and
interpreter both. For here was another difficulty: the Lapps spoke
Quivnsk (or Finnish), and we did not. We possessed a slender vocabulary
of Russian and Norsk between us, and this, it appeared, would be of as
much value in Lapland as Spanish or Fijian. French, German, and English
were equally useless, and, as it turned out, our remaining rags of
schoolboy dog-Latin, made the only language which we brought into that
country which we were able to turn to any practical use within its
marches.
Finally, came the question of money. Finland is a Grand Duchy of
Russia, conquered by that power from Sweden in 1809; but the Russian
rouble has never become acclimatised there. The standard coin is the
"mark," which equals a franc, and which contains ten "pennis." The mark
has overflowed into Lapland; and so that country, peopled though it may
be by the oldest tribe in Europe, and far behindhand in other matters,
is still ahead of England in having the one civilised requisite of a
decimal coinage.
But of Finnish marks in Vardö there was not so much as a single specimen
even on a watch-chain. Norwegian kroner, dirty Russian notes, and greasy
kopecks were current in all abundance, and so were comely English
sovereigns. But of money to help us into this fenced-in Lapland we could
not get one doit. And so, as an intermediate step, we procured roubles
and kopecks, and a rare bother we had with them later on before we could
get them exchanged further. But of that small distraction we were
blissfully ignorant just then. We did not miss it either. We had quite
enough other preliminary difficulties to keep us occupied.
In the meanwhile the _Windward_ was getting a new main-topsail yard and
reefing spar made by a local ship's carpenter with a tendency to
dipsomania, and in spite of her desperate hurry to depart Polewards, she
was kept lingering. And the good fellows we had chummed with during that
pleasant voyage from the Thames, pervaded the town, and competed with
one another in abusing its all-embracing stink. But as the days went on,
the stink was an atmospheric effect which one got used to, and I could
imagine in time one would feel almost lonely without it. To use a
professional term, it was the necessary "local colour." It never
faltered in its vehemence, never varied in its ample quality. Come gale,
come rain, it was always there, always ready to touch the nostril with
its firm caress. It tinctured the wind with its full-flavoured strength,
it came off to the yacht and got into the onion salad on the cabin
table, it even climbed down into the engine-room and odorised that with
the essence of departed cod.
One likened the smell of the place to the lamp of the Persian
fire-worshippers elsewhere. Neither is ever allowed to go out. Day by
day one is replenished with oil, the other with new fishy débris, each
with sacred care. For those Northmen know that if once the stink of fish
died out, Vardö would cease to exist. The barren rocks of the island
barely show so much as a blade of grass. Nothing but fish stands between
their town and obliteration.
[Illustration: The _Windward_]