THE LAND OF THE NORTH WIND.*
THE romance of travel still lingers in the North, preserved, in spite of modern mechanism, by the stern facts of nature which that mechanism can neither subdue nor cajole, and by the air of adventure which attaches to it, long after the South and even the mysterious East have fallen into the soul-deadening routine of managed tours. The midnight sun has not yet been vulgarised, and while there are uncertainties, inconveniences, and bodily hardships to be endured in making them, such journeys as those which Mr. Rae made in company with Mr. Pilkington (who is "known north of the Arctic Circle by the honorary rank of 'Doctor' ") will retain the charm of the uncommon and unknown.
The appeal of these travels to the imagination is not so powerful as that of the awful solitudes of the Ice-kingdom, whither our Arctic ships are sailing at this hour, but it comes next to their appeal in strength, and we respond to it, as we follow the travellers on board the Hakon Jarl ' at Throndhjem, and the steamer slips down the glassy Nivelden, bound for the Arctic, "the land of the Laplanders, the land of mist and snow, the land of icebergs and whales, the land of the North wind and the midnight sun ;". and sails away day and night along the coast, through fiord and strait, between crag and island. The wind comes gustily in from the Arctic, but the good ship with the grand name is sheltered in her course by "the grandest breakwater in the world," the broken fringe of rocks extending from the southern capes of Norway to the uttermost parts of the North. To go on shore at Tromso must have been delightful after a pull up the solemn fiord in a boat ; to land abruptly and sheer from the deep water, and to walk up a wooded valley among silver birch-trees, past mossy banks and over rippling brooks, through carpets of oak and beech,ferns, and blueberries, hare- bells, and anemones. In the North Land one must be constantly charmed with the sense of the combined delicacy of form and hardiness of the plant and flower world. Beyond that lovely valley the travellers came on the first encampment of the Lapps, a sorry sight, for the people were poor and dirty, with but one pleasant object among them,—a clean and magnificent Lapp baby, in a red leather cradle lined with soft white fur. The "Baby Bunting" of our nursery literature, whose "daddy's gone a hunting," is clearly of Northern derivation. At Bosekap the difficult travel begins, where guides and pack-horses are hired, the beaten track is abandoned, and the travellers become con- scious of mosquitos, thenceforth to be the plague of their ex- istence, and also of increasing appetites calculated to render the commissariat question an anxious one. Everything, except the mosquitos, is delightful ; the sweet, bright air, the delicious birch woods, and the first sight of the Fjelds, with a forty-miles stretch of undulating rocky hills, softened with moss, lichens, and brush- wood, with small bare lakes here and here, and patches of snow ; and far over to the west, seaward, the dark and splendid mountains of the Finmark coast. Mr. Rae and the Doctor did -not think much of Suolovuohne, where they suffered. horribly from mosquitos. We remember to have read in Count Goblet d'Alviella's book of Lapland travel that the merciless little wretches may be baulked by travellers' smearing their skins with a mixture of tar and. milk, but Mr. Rae seems to have been ignorant of any means of prevention, and to have repeatedly wasted time and strength in killing a fewthousands of the creatures, of course without decreasing their number to any perceptible extent. For a long distance the travellers rode through ab- solute solitudes, for the Laplanders with their reindeer were in the mountains by the sea. At Kautokeino they halted; and found
The-Land of-the North Wind; or, Travois among the Laplanders and the Samoyedes. By Edward Rae, F R.G.S. London: John Murray.
a village of red wooden houses and some Lapp huts. This is the pima where the terrible outburst of fanaticisradeseribed byCount d'Alviella took place twenty years ago, wheueeveral murders were committed, and the pastor and his wife had. a. narrow escape from death.
During his stay at Kautokeino, Mr. Rae introduces us to his historical notebook, and very interesting it is. He has admirably condensed and arranged a quantity of information contained in a quaint, full, and gravely humorous "History of Lapland, written by John Schefferus, Professor of Law and Rhetorrick at Upsal, in Sweden, and printed in English at the Theater in Oxford, 1674." He calls this history "the most delightful of old books," and judging from-the samples, we think it must be so. Bat why did he not take the hint-conveyed in the following passage of a de- scription of the "Wild -Beasts" of Lapland, which, according to
Schefferns, are very numerous ?—
" The gnats infest man and beast, the Reindeers especially, which on that account are driven to the monntains. The men arm themselves by keeping a. continual smoak in the house, and in sleeping by putting a blanket over head and body. Abroad they wear a garment of hides, and many to defend themselves from this insect dawb their faces all over, except-their etas; with Resine and Pitch."
The ascent of the Alen River, in a canoe, with a young Quain, or half-Finlander, and an old Lapp, for the crew, is a charming picture of free and independent travel ; then come the birch- woods again, and the embarkation on the Muonio, which is to bring the travellers into the really outlandish uplands of the 'world. Mr. Rae does not say much about the effect of the con- tinuous light of the sun, which Count Goblet d'Alviella dwells upon, nor does he remark upon the regularly recurring hush of nature during the hours whichwould be dark if there were any night there ; he merely tells us that they saw a glorious double midnight ralabove, and- the "jovial, genial old Sun himself was their midnight torch." He describes the MuSnio and its cataracts charmingly, adding that it is hard to imagine the bright clear river, so full of life and strength, ice-bound, silent, and inotionless in the winter, when it is frozen to the depth of ten feet. When the friends embarked upon it, it rushed, all golden in the Arctic evening sun, between its fringe-border of graceful silvery birch trees, and bounded to the falls, which Mr. Rae
describes with infectious enthusiasm :—
"How the torn and broken rocks flew past, how the furious beaten waters swept round and over them ! How they howled and roared along with us! How the men pulled, at a glance from Abraham, and ' how they watched for his eye ! Above the rocks on either bank were pine trees, clear and beautiful against the sky, but we were going too swiftly to see much of them. Our boat flew like a bunted sea-bird, never touching a rock or stone, guided by the unfailing bands of Abraham and his famous crew. It was a curious feeling; one of such absolute and happy confidence in men that we saw for the first time a few hours ago. We had descended the first series of falls ; the men -paused for a breathing-space, and then we hurried into the second and more difficult mass of tumbling waters. We glanced between two grim and deadly rocks like a cork on a seething flood, and shot down, down into a white and ((main..' cauldron fifty feet below us. The next moment we shot round a shelf of rock, and it was a solemn and im- pressive sight to watch the great river tumbling and bursting through the gorge, and over the frightful broken descent by which we had come."
During this voyage the language of the boatmen excited the travellers' admiration. Mr. Rae-says :—
" The Finnish tongue, I think, is the finest I have ever listened to. I have never been so struck with- a. language ; to hear these illiterate boatmen talk to one another in sounds that rivalled the most beautiful in the ancient Greek, made us jealous, and very ambitious to speak it with them. No weak, mincing words, no coarse gutturals ; more digni- fied than the delicate French, more manly and strong than the soft Spanish."
After the Muenio came the Torn* by which the travellers journey through Swedish Lapland to the sea. The banks of this river are far lees lonely than those of the Muonio ; they are dotted with huts and store-houses, as many as twenty in view at one time, and Rnskola (on the Swedish side) is quite a town,—for this part of the world. Before they reach Riiskola they pass the famous mountain of Aawasaksa, on the Russian side, the index of the Arctic Circler where Maupertius and Celsius stayed for some time taking celestial and terrestrial observations in the cause of science. With the travellers' arrival at Matarengi, the real wild- ness of the journey comes to an end, for karyol-travelling is in- cluded among the civilised modes, (we observe that people who have not gone beyond Norway spell the perch-like vehicle earriole,) and hitherto Mr. Rae and the Doctor had seen nothing to signify of the Laplanelers. Their-plan of travel was now leading them away from the wild tribes and their country to the differently interesting territory of Finland, and again by a coasting voyage. From Haparancla, where one of the many erownings of King Oscar took place, they made an expedition to the village of Kemi,
where there is an ancient stone church, in whose vaults lie the embalmed bodies of five hundred ancient bishops, strange relics of the old old times of Scandinavian history.
Of the Russian province of Finland, and of the government of it, the travellers have naught but good things to say. The people are mild, good, honest, self-respecting, and the conditions of life, including delicious air and spacious houses, are easy. In the-sea- port of Gamle Karleby, a respectable middle-class family of four persons can live upon 125 a year. Everything is cheap, bread, meat, fruit, milk, coffee, fowls, eggs, fish, and lodging. It was at Haparauda that Mr. Rae and Doctor parted with the midnight sun, and as they came down the channel leading from the main street of Gamic Karleby there was a touch of twilight upon the water, and they began to feel that they were drawing southwards. So they sailed along the coast to Wasa, which was a beautiful old city, but is distressingly new at present, having been built up after a great fire. Of this place Mr. Rae says :—" Each fourth house was a vodka establishment, and red- eyed, swollen vodka-drinkers staggered along in every street. This was our first interview with one since we had come abroad." At the end of each long street of the town stands the untouched Finland forest, for the town was built in a compact square, and girt by pine-trees. Uleaborg, a really important sea-port, is de- lightfully described by the author, who has a useful way of illus- trating his statements, so that, with a map before him, the reader can fully realise his meaning, as, for instance,, in this note about the climate :—" The strength of the summer at Uleaborg is stir- prising; wheat has been cut within six weeks of the seed entering the ground. Uleaborg is on the latitude of Kern on the White Sea, Tchakotskoi on the Frozen Sea, South Cape in Greenland, Skaholt in Iceland, and Krondhjem in Norway." When they steam past the Swedish ironclad monitor flotilla,' diabolical- looking and ugly, cruising among the Aland Isles, in the beautiful Stockholm fiord, and come in sight of the bright and cheerful city, concerning whose beauty they are less rapturous than most travellers, they get into more beaten tracks, and we need not follow them, otherwise than by acknowledging the pleasure with which we have read Mr. liae's notes of travel in Sweden. Of a second journey, which took them to the unvisited land lying to the east of the White Sea, the home of the Samoyodes—who are not cannibals, though their name means 'Sell-eaters '—and was a far more adventmous undertaking, we shall have more to say.
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