Chapter X: Towards the Doom

The ascent of the broad Tana in that big old black boat was slow, tedious, and terribly monotonous.

For the most part the river, famous for its salmon and the particles of gold the water contains, flowed across a great, open, treeless tundra, and often the current was so strong that the three rowers required the assistance of Henkela, himself a fisherman, to keep her head to the stream.

The distance from Seida to Karasjok was nearly three hundred kilometres, and most of the course lay due south through a barren land entirely uninhabited save where the Lapps had settled upon the banks to fish. And it was in these huts, in every way similar to the huts of the encampment near Seida, that each night they sought shelter and slept.

Landing several times each day to cook food and stretch themselves was the only recreation they obtained; therefore Dick, seated in the stern of the boat hour after hour and day after day as they slowly ascended the stream, turned his main attention to Henkela, in order to improve his knowledge of the Lapp poetry.

The weather was by no means propitious. Often they would be delayed for hours by those dense white mists which hung over the river each morning, and more than once snow fell heavily. Still, even Owen, matter-of-fact Londoner that he was, was compelled to admit that the journey was fraught with plenty of excitement and many humorous episodes.

To enliven the voyage, and to encourage the rowers to their oars, Henkela, at Dick’s request, took to chanting the old runes. Sometimes he would sing of the beautiful Luonnotar, daughter of the air, of the supreme god, the ancient of years, Ukko, or of Vainamoinen, the eternal singer who was for thirty years imprisoned with his mother.

Hour after hour, across those broad-flowing waters with their rippling shallows, would the voice of the dark-faced Lapp sound, with that soft sibillation peculiar to his own unwritten tongue, musical almost as Italian.

As well as he could he would, after chanting the runes, explain what they meant in English.

One day Henkela, as the rowers kept up the rhythm of the oars, was explaining the rivalry in magic between the Finns and Lapps which is so strongly marked in the magic and epic runes.

“Lapp magic is not poetical,” he was explaining as well as he could in his somewhat indifferent English. “It is of that damnable kind, called by the Norse _seidr_. This word has not entered the Finnic tongue, but we Lapps have taken it and applied it to formless or rude images of our deities in wood, or in stone, because we used them years ago in our magic operations. We Lapps all believe in magic.”

“But surely you are Christians!” Jervoise exclaimed.

“We believe in magic, nevertheless,” Henkela declared. “Each day when I go forth fishing I make my song of prayer—my _rukouksia_. I say: ‘Vellamo, mistress of waters, Queen of a hundred sea-caves, Arouse the scaly crowd, Urge on the fish flocks. Forth from their hiding-place. Forth from the muddy slime. Forth to this net-hauling. To the weights of the hundred-meshed. Take now thy beauteous shield. Shake the golden water-lily with which the fish thou frighten’st. And driv’st them towards the net. Beneath the plain so gloomy, Above the boulders black.’”

“Most interesting!” declared Odd, who had been listening attentively.

“Again,” exclaimed the Lapp with the sharp black eyes, as he puffed at his long pipe, setting his gaze straight towards the grey bank of mist before him. “Again, if I am ill, and I take waters as a medicine, I repeat the words: ‘O pure water, O Lady of the waters, Now do thou make me whole, Strong as before. For this I beg thee dearly, And in offering I gave thee, Blood to appease thee, Salt to propitiate thee.’”

One morning, after passing an uncomfortable night in the hut of some nomad Lapps near the dreary Finnish settlement of Audagoski, they had been delayed from starting for several hours by the dense fog which hung over the river, and in which it was impossible to row.

At length, however, about noon, they had made a start, and at the suggestion of Jervoise, Henkela had resumed his explanation of the land of Pohjola as being the seat of evils and darkness. In all the Lapp songs Pohja, or Pohjola, is conspicuous, and according to Henkela that mythical country of the far north beyond the eternal snows was inhabited by Lapps, and the lady of Pohjola was Lady of the Lapps.

This Lady is one of the principal types among the heroines of the “Kalevala,” and from her mythic region, ill-omened in character and harbourer of ills, come forth all the evils that afflict the northern peoples, such as ice, snow, cold winds, and the darkness of winter. It is a remote region, existing they know not exactly where; but in what direction is clearly shown by the icy breath of Boreas which comes out of it. A country of fearsome imagination, an outer land on the northern confines of the earth (ulkomaa), essentially dark (pimea) and cold (kylma) the country of Pakkanen (icy coldness), a wretched land, fatal to men and heroes, where sun and moon are never seen, but visible in the eternal night is the “coloured cover” (kyrjokansi) or the star-studded vault of the sky.

All this curious lore of a practically unknown people Dick Jervoise found peculiarly fascinating, and by the hour he sat chatting and learning from Henkela, whose broken English daily became clearer to the pair.

That morning the little brown-faced man had, at Jervoise’s request, been chanting the “Kalevala,” the rowers keeping time with the runes as they passed through that dismal, depressing land. The quaint ancient poetry told how the daughter of the air, tired of her long solitude, came down from the vast untrodden regions of the air and settled on the surface of the waters, where for seven hundred years she floated hither and thither as Lady of the Waters.

The runes told how the egg of a duck fell into the sea and broke, and the fragments underwent a transformation. From the two halves of the shell arose the vault of the sky, and the terrestrial hemisphere below it; from the yolk the sun took form; from the white the moon; from the more shining parts the stars; from the darker parts the clouds. The story was told of how every tree grew, save the oak, which Vainamoinen, the eternal rune-maker, at last made grow by a fire lit by five sea-maidens; how it rose so high as to darken the clouds, and how a giant was called to cut it down and fling it into the waters, where it was carried north to the shore of the dreaded land of Pohjola.

He sang those five hundred or so lines of the quaint national song of ages long past in his curious plaintive chant, the rowers straining at their long oars and keeping time.

And when he had concluded he translated portions of it into his indifferent English. The conclusion the two travellers understood to be as follows:—

Spake ancient Vainamoinen:
“Come now, thou dame of Pohjola,
Go we to share the Sampo,
To see the coloured cover,
On the point of the misty headland,
On the height of the fog-swathed island.”
Says of Pohjola the lady:
“I’ll not go to share the Sampo,
To see the coloured cover.”
Then ancient Vainamoinen
Sieved mist within a sieve
And around about fog sowed he
At the foggy headland’s ending;
And thus in words then spake he:
“Here ploughing and here sowing,
Here every kind of grain-crop
For the wretched north country,
For the widespread soil of Suomi.
Moons here, and here be suns,
Here stars be in the skies!”
Says of Pohjola the lady:
“To this I’ll find a hindrance;
A wondrous thing have found I
For thy ploughing, for thy sowing.
I’ll create a hail of iron,
Of steel a raging rain-storm,
To strike thy crops so tender,
To scourge and waste thy field!”
Spake ancient Vainamoinen:
“Create thy hail of iron,
Yea, cause to fall thy steel storm,
Upon the land of Pohjola,
On the crest of the cliff of clay.”

The river mists had now lifted, disclosing the low, treeless banks of the broad-flowing waters—a wide, dreary, uninhabited wilderness. Here and there clumps of dwarf silver-birch, the trees only four or five feet in height, struggled for an existence. This was the edge of the tree zone. Travelling south, it was the first sign of vegetation in addition to the moss and lichen of the Arctic tundras.

As next day and the next they continued their voyage up-stream the birches grew thicker and higher, their grey trunks adding to the general melancholy of the scene.

At rare intervals they passed a few scattered Lapp huts near the river bank, when the rowers would shout their salutations, awakening a horde of dogs whose barking made exchange of greetings difficult. Sometimes they would land to allow the three rowers to rest, and receive the hospitality of a Lapp hut, and in exchange make presents to the chubby, brown-faced little children in furs.

In that great lone, God-forgotten land, where fog and stretches of snow intensified the gloom, and where the only means of subsistence were the fish and the reindeer, those fur-clad wanderers of the tundra, dwarfed of stature and still savage of nature, only just managed to keep body and soul together. Many of the men went, in winter, down to the coast to work in the cod-fishing or in those strong-smelling “hjelder,” the timber-built sheds where the fish is dried for the European markets. The others remained in their turf-built settlements, herding their reindeer and awaiting the passing of the long night.

Henkela one afternoon ordered the rowers to halt at a sharp bend of the river, now rapidly narrowing and more wooded on its banks, and, landing, conducted Jervoise and his friend to the “siedi,” or sacred oracle-stones of Lavvajok. The same day they passed three dangerous rapids, which roared and foamed, and as night closed in they found themselves at the junction of the Karasjokka (rapid river) with the Tana.

Dick Jervoise had one thought, one fear. Each day, each hour, brought him nearer a crisis of his life. And that thought obsessed him during the whole journey through the monotonous gloom.

They found a Lapp hut, where they spent the night wrapped in their furs, for it was snowing heavily and intensely cold; and next morning ascended the swiftly-flowing stream which ran through thick birch woods to the little Lapp town of Karasjok, where their boat journey ended.

The time at their disposal was very limited, for they had already taken a day and a half longer in ascending the Tana than they had estimated, and now, in order to catch the _Mercur_, they would be compelled to travel in all haste due north again to the Porsanger Fjord.

Though they found Karasjok and its three hundred or so inhabitants intensely interesting, they could only remain there six hours. Then, bidding adieu to their three rowers, they with Henkela, mounted into two ramshackle vehicles, each of which was driven by a Lapp in reindeer _pesk_, fur boots, and four-cornered cap stuffed with eider-down, and set their faces due north across the wide, rolling tundra, upon which snow had already fallen, though not so deeply as to enable them to use sleds.

From Karasjok to Laxelven, at the extreme head of the fjord, was a distance of about a hundred kilometres. But progress was difficult owing to the bad state of the track. The route is a winter way used by the Lapps in their boat-sleds. Therefore, in autumn, before the heavy snow has fallen, it is in places almost impassable.

On the road there was neither resthouse nor even Lapp huts, therefore the drivers were compelled to husband the strength of their horses, and progress was consequently very slow.

Evening drew on with that curious steely light only seen within the Polar circle, that bright greyness which quite suddenly gives place to total darkness. They were slowly plodding their way around the base of a bare, giant, snow-covered mountain, known to the Lapps as the Gvornik and for ages regarded as sacred, owing to its form like a crouching man. The birches around were stunted, and ever and anon could be heard the dismal howling of the wolves which infest that district. Before them in the cheerless gloom lay the grey waters of the Lake of Igja, and Henkela explained that while in winter the sleds traversed its frozen surface from end to end, it was at that season necessary, in order to avoid the swamps, to make a long detour.

For the thousandth time Dick Jervoise cursed himself that he had not continued in the _Mercur_, landed at Archangel, and gone south to Petersburg. The journey they were now completing must end in disaster. That was inevitable!

The tired horses stumbled over the rough way, and the tearing wind in their teeth was bitingly cold. So sharp, indeed, was it that Dick and his friend had their faces half hidden by their big fur hoods and their hands in their mitts. All were hungry; therefore, after consultation, it was arranged to halt by the lakeside, light a fire, and have a meal, while the horses rested.

In that lonely, dismal spot they remained, sheltered from the tearing wind as well as they could by the two Lapp carts, until about three o’clock in the morning, when, all having snatched a brief sleep reclining before the fire on their baggage, they struck camp and pushed again onward.

“If we don’t turn up in time at Kjelvik,” laughed Dick, as he mounted into the rickety old vehicle, “then Martin must go on with the mails and we’ll be left up here to spend the winter! What would your patients in Hammersmith do then, my dear fellow—eh?”

“They’d have to die happily, without my aid,” exclaimed the other, with grim humour.

“Never fear,” interrupted the faithful Henkela, “you will be in Kjelvik in time. We have yet two days. We shall be at Laxelven to-morrow evening, and row down the fjord fifty kilometres to Kistrand, and then by another boat to Kjelvik.”

“We leave it entirely to you, Henkela,” Jervoise said. “We must catch the _Mercur_ at all hazards. We couldn’t spend the winter here with you. We have no proper clothes or equipment, and could not, in consequence, withstand the cold.”

“You would have to wear the dress of our people and live in our huts. You would not suffer,” answered the Lapp simply. “Our life, though so rough to you, is very healthful after all.”

“We’ll return again next year—never fear,” Owen promised.

He was just as anxious to rejoin the ship as his friend had been to leave it.

Dick had grown more silent and thoughtful in the hours which slowly passed as they pushed forward towards the coast.

How much would he give if he could but avoid travelling by the old _Mercur_? True, he could land in Hammerfest after they had rounded the North Cape.

But it would then, alas! be too late.

On board that black steamer, with its eternal smell of cod-liver oil, was Paul Grinevitch, the last man in the whole world he desired to meet. Had not Captain Martin told them he was to pick up Berentsen, Thyra, and the young Russian on his way back from Archangel?

Alone in that terrible land of darkness and desolation all the winter it was impossible to remain.

To meet that man to whom Thyra Berentsen was engaged was now absolutely imperative. There was no way by which to avoid him.

On the morrow he must board the steamer; he must meet Paul Grinevitch face to face!

He shrank, yet he set his teeth hard and his brows contracted at thought of what must ensue at that encounter.

A name escaped his lips involuntarily, yet so low that his friend seated beside him did not distinguish it.

“Thyra! Thyra!”

Yes. He must act—act even at risk of his own honour—for her sake!