NORWAY AND THE MAELSTROM.
111HE following notes of one or two days' sight-seeing within the Arctic Circle may perhaps be interesting to some of your readers. What I saw made a strong impression upon me, as of scenery unlike anything which I had seen in the more frequented' show-places of Europe.
The yacht 'Aphrodite,' one of the loveliest things which ever sailed from Cowes, brought us from " off " Bonchurch, in the Isle of Wight, to Bergen, in three days nineteen hours. Every one knows the strange appearance of the coast of Norway on the map, how it looks like a piece of stuff which has got very much frayed. at the edge—how innumerable lochs and fiords pierce it in all directions, as if they made or found great cracks and fissures in its mountain-wall ; while all this is again protected from the ocean by a fringe of islands, which leave only a few gaps where you are obliged to cross a space of open sea. This arrangement is delight- ful for small boats, fishing craft, and the square-sailed, black- prowed " ycegts," laden to the water's edge, which carry fish and oil from Hammerfest to Bergen and elsewhere ; even as in old time, it was just the thing for the Norse pirates, whom we are proud to count among our ancestors, who fought and murdered each other n these narrow waters, or issued from them to kill or conquer other people ; but a delicate, high-mettled yacht like- the Aphrodite,' one large enough to breast the North Sea with safety now-a-days, would generally find herself obliged to take the outside sea-passage, from sheer want of room to work to windward with in the narrow water-lanes- within. So, luxury upon luxury, my friend engages a stout steam- tug at Bergen, so that with this useful slave to pull, and a steam- launch on board for short trips, no recess of any fiord that we might wish to see could escape unvisited. After exploring several of them, the Sogne Fiord especially, we found ourselves one June evening passing the Arctic Circle, and approaching Bodo, the southernmost town within that line. We had beesi sketching at our anchorage of the previous night, right through from one day to another (scene, a few red-timbered fish-containing- warehouses, standing in the water almost, some stacks of fish in course of being dried on the sloping rock, which looked like sheaves of corn against the purple and gold of a line of peaks tcs the north, and behind us a range of snow-streaked mountain, fiercely red in the sunset) ; but there the sun had touched the sea, —to-night we were to see him move along the crests of the far-off Lofodens, with no lessening of his splendour, and spring upwards without a moment's rest. A rock prevented our seeing this from the harbour of Bodo itself, so a hill was to be ascended which avoided or overlooked all obstacles. A chosen party of the crew went with us. I confess that I felt a twinge of an Englishman's instinctive horror of a show, when I found on landing at 11 o'clock that not only the Union Jack had been brought on shore to be borne aloft before us, but that musical instruments of many kinds. had been brought too ; that something like a procession was formed, and that no small part of our sailors' enjoyment lay in the notion of "giving a start to the old women of Bodo." We got to the cairn, found the mark which the 'Aphrodite's' voyagers had set up on a previous visit, but the great sight of the midnight sun was missed, owing to the cloudy weather. The sailors were my entertainment. They made the dwarf birch-trees of the hill- side feed their bonfire by wholesale, loyal and other toasts were. drunk and songs sung, of which the music was pathetic and fairly good ; but the words, composed in some cases by one of themselves, did not reward my interest in them ; they were too "naturalistic," and I felt that we had not a Burns, or anything like the making of one, amongst our crew. The whole thing made me think a little of that hankering for a return to barbarism which philosophers tell us still lingers in civilised men. I enjoyed it accordingly. The sailors had brought the grotesque masks which played a large part in the fun of the forecastle on Saturday night,—they danced, leaped, and made themselves into monkeys beautifully. I stole round to the other side of the cairn. What a maze of rocks, peaks, and leaden-grey spaces of water I How I thanked our quiet Norwegian pilot, when I saw the quanti- ties of low, rounded rocks just awash with the tide which he had brought us through! How small the group of houses and masts (the ' Aphrodite's ' among them) which 1 recognised as BodU looked, with the rain fretting its narrow channels or sweeping in cloudy volumes along this or that mysterious line of fiord, blurring the faint pinkish light upon some great field of snow or shapeless mass of island or cape, on which along ray came streaming from a mist-shrouded midnight sun. Northward, the view was a little bit like what an idealising landscape-painter of the old school—all honour be to them !—might have made out of Derwentwater, with its islands as seen from above Lodore, by sharpening and steepening Skiddaw a good deal, putting a sharp-peaked rock- island in place of Catbells or Grisedale Pike, and 66happing up," as they say in the North, all the rest in grey mist. By this time
the sailors had finished their games, their songs (" God Save the Queen" to end with, of course), and their transplantation of a small tree to adorn the 'Aphrodite' cairn. Their doings had been ordinary enough, but somehow I always liked everything they did. If only we could get such servants for our houses at home ! My most esteemed friend and amiable host, sometime M.P. for my own county, had a dark streak of anti-Russian feeling in him ; politeness required, in these wild times, that I should keep my reflections to myself about the wickedness, of using the splendid strength, activity, quickness, readiness to obey, and unfailing courage of our sailors in careless or selfish alliance with a defence of wrong. The little street of Bodo did not, I dare say, suffer much from the noise we made in our return. Englishmen are popular in Norway, and whoever did get up to look at our madness did not, we may be sure, anathematise us much. We went to bed at once on getting to the yacht, for we were to see the Lofodens to-morrow, and to start in the Activ ' at eight.
The next morning accordingly saw us steaming across the Vestfiord, as the space of sea is called which lies between the mainland and the long, many-linked chain of the Lofoden Islands. The distance is about 40 miles, but this width decreases towards the north, where the last of the chain lies close to the mainland. We steamed straight across to the southernmost but two of these islands, between which and its southern neighbours lies the whirl- pool of the Maelstrom. We had read or heard of Edgar Poe's fantasy on the subject, we had also heard of a Norwegian captain who said he knew of no such whirlpool,—had never heard of it, in fact, except from English tourists! There was room for much imaginative interest between these two extremes, and some risk was really worth running to enable us to judge for ourselves. We had our pilot, who had brought us from Bergen, we had the master and owner of the Activ,' who had a wife and six children and the uninsured Activ ' besides; but to make assur- ance trebly sure, we allowed the pilot to stop at the village nearest to the dreaded thing, and take on board a fisherman able to tell us exactly what we might or might not do with it. The scenery of this village, Skoorvag, was wild in the extreme, all rock and ravine, with sharp teeth of serrated crags, which reminded me of the Coolin Hills in Skye. Our fisherman-guide came on board as we were finishing luncheon. He liked the job immensely ; "the tide was just right," but whether for our safety or for the display of the Maelstriim's character I could not make out, but hoped that something between the two was meant. A very few minutes' steaming round the point of Mosknees put this question and the powers of the Activ ' to the test. The roughness, only a gentle slide over a rather big wave at first, almost immediately increased to a violent pitching, a tar-barrel broke loose, spare coals tumbled -about the deck, everything went astray which could not hold -or be held tight, and the captain and proprietor of the Activ ' looked as if he would not let his boat meddle with the Maelstrom again, if he could help it. It was like the race of Portland or of Alderney in a stiff breeze, the sailors said. I thought of the strength of our engine-30 horse- power, I believed—and hoped that the Maelstriim was not going to be worse, and that the getting the vessel round for our return would be managed nicely. However, we ran right through, and looked at the receding precipices of the Lofodens, from the sea- ward side, then took a wide sweep, and ran through the race again, which was a trifle quieter when we had the tide with us. The wildest forms of rock and mountain would add nothing to the terrors of such a scene as this strait between Mosknoss and Voero would present in wild weather. We, however, could afford to marvel at the height and steepness of the Lofoden wall, 2,000 feet clear on the one side, and the pitiless, sharp-toothed rocks of Moskna, on the other, with their base lost in the bright mist of 'raging waves,—a misty light, which shone far away in the western sun, over a dark wavy lino of rushing waters. There certainly was a Maelstrbm, the ebb and flow of so large a body of water .as the Vestfiord, through so small a strait, and the sudden and -enormous increase in the depth of the sea between the two islands, forming a mighty Niagara, in fact, below the surface, being sufficient cause. Fortunately, as in the case of many another of Nature's terrible things, it does not interfere much with man and his work. Fishermen, though their business lies perilously near, know its humours well, and when and how to avoid them. By the way, the quantity of fish caught in these waters is something startling, the take of one season being reckoned by millions. We made a purchase of ee or four hundred fish (good eatable ones, as we found after- wards), at the village whore we landed our fisherman pilot, for the value of an English half-crown. This village was the centre of a fine picture. For once I thought nature had contented her- self with a noble arrangement of black and white alone, with her purple-black rocks set in almost columnar masses, and sword-like streams of dazzling snow in every fissure. It was only man who had thrown in some strong bits of Indian red in the painted timber of the houses, and perhaps I am unfair to Nature in for- getting some small patches of vivid emerald green. We re- gained the luxury of the 'Aphrodite,' in the harbour of Bodo, at 11.30.
So much for a grey picture. The next day brought me one with more colour in it. We had started for the south, the morning was dull, and I had thought that it was a day for writing letters below ; but coming on deck in the afternoon, I found that all had changed. I must say beforehand that passing this part of the coast on our way northward, I thought I had never seen such dreariness, such ranges of huge, formless rooks, and such gloom in cloud and sky. I could not enjoy, could hardly endure its inky gloom. Now the last fragments of mist were Vanishing from each mountain mass, which rose in Egyptian squareness of light and shade immediately from the calm water in which it was reflected,—snowfields, warm in the afternoon sun- shine, showed themselves through every deep gap or trench between them. Sometimes one of these blocks of mountain formed an island of itself, and we glided between it and the main- land, and one after another of these islands, together with the mainland, formed a setting for a long vista of rose-hued peak and-precipice and snowfield, which kept their place for hours, only with more and more sunhghted atmosphere between us and them. I could not help noting how seldom Nature, even in Norway, in- dulges in the vagary of perfectly perpendicular precipices ; how she keeps to a fair admixture of slope and debris-slide, with in- tervals only of sheer descent ; but here in the mountains which we were passing about ten o'clock p.m. the greatest lover of idealised steepness could not but be content with reality. They were obelisks and monoliths rather than mountains, with deep desolate hollows of valley or sea-gulf resting in purple shadow at their feet, and the flowing curves and radiant light of one of the largest glacier-bearing fjelds in Norway encom- passing them above. There were no peaks in that snowy back- ground, only lines of rock, which seemed to support its curves, and clasp them here and there with gorgeous jewels. You could hardly imagine any passes to tempt you to invade that silence, but rested content in the impression of sublimity conveyed by the delicate fitting of the snow-line with the olive-green of the clear sky. But if there was something almost lunar-looking in the vividness of the light, the abruptness of the chasms, and the depth of the shadows flung across them, the link with life and our own dearly-beloved humanity was supplied by the tall, square sail, overtaken now and then, of some deep-laden ytegt " thread- ing her way slowly through the labyrinth of rooks; by the eider- ducks, which clustered upon their shelves and amongst the rich brown sea-weed, and hardly stirred as we passed them by ; or by the glow of the sun reflected from a window under the projecting roof of some fisherman's house, solitary, but for one or two vessels an- chored close by for the night. By this time it was after eleven o'clock,—we had not actually seen the sun above the horizon at midnight the night before, if we could only remain where we were for another half-hour, the rocks on the seaward side were sufficiently low and scattered to allow us so to see him, and his splendour was strange and wonderful now. The tawny, dusky, but dazzling and clear gold of the light, the purple which was all but black of the sea, the dusk-red and bronze of the rooks, the scarlet of the yacht's masts and ropes and of our own figures, were certainly not such as I had ever seen before. We slacken the speed of our steamer, so as only just to keep the hawser from fouling the screw. Now a sphinx-like rock comes between us and the sun. Shall we get rid of that before twelve, or will the sun rise again before that other rock comes in the way ? Is our time wrong, and is that shadow upon the snow really lessoning with the sun's ascent? The sailors run up to the masthead, one of our party follows, and gets his feet chalked at about the twentieth ratline for venturing upon those sacred ropes. Now it is un- doubtedly twelve, and there is the sun burning as at noonday, now clearly speeding upward, with no rose of dawn, but with the same dusky glow and fierce lustre as had attended his descent. It is too late to talk of Hestmando, the wonderful mountain with its wild legend, which we are passing now. The yacht speeds on, and I am richer by the memory of such a midnight as can only be seen within the Arctic Circle. A. W. 'luxe%
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