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At Haparanda I had driven about seven hundred and forty miles from Stockholm, and over twenty-five hundred miles since I had left the mountains of Norway. I was only forty-one miles south of the Arctic Circle, which is the most southerly part of "The Land of the Long Night." I had hardly arrived in Haparanda, when the leading people of the place came to welcome me.
This superficial sculpturing must have been a very recent operation; and the transport of the heavy stones opposite the entrance of the streams has been effected by ice, and perhaps by snow; just as the arctic ice strews the shores of the Polar ocean with rocks.
Up to the present, from the time of their passing Disko Island, the voyagers had seen plenty of seals and walruses, with an occasional white bear, a few Arctic foxes, a herd or two of reindeer, and even a few specimens of the elk and musk-ox, to say nothing of birds, such as snow- geese, eider and long-tailed ducks, sea-eagles, divers, auks, and gulls.
"It has cost us a rough voyage and a winter in the Arctic Regions, if it doesn't cost us more yet, to put that ermine fringe on our jumpers. I can make nothing of this knot; try what you can do with it, messmate, will you?"
The men know that doctors' visits are practically impossible. Therefore they follow the advice of their officers. Yet the men have all the comforts that it is humanly possible to obtain. The cloud fighters are extremely well fed. Huts are provided, fitted with stoves similar to those used in Arctic expeditions.
Those feelings of kindliness and good-will which warm the breasts of all right-minded men at this season of the year, filled our Arctic voyagers to overflowing. Thoughts of "home" came crowding on them with a power that they had not felt at other times.
The appearance of the land was not altogether uninviting. It rose to seven or eight hundred feet, and there was the usual vegetation found in the arctic regions. Reindeer and hares were plentiful, as were ducks and other birds. In one spot were the remains of no less than sixty Esquimaux habitations, consisting of stones laid one over the other, in regular circles, eight or nine feet in diameter.
I had not been long on the sea before I found that I had exchanged the terrific winds of Arctic "Snow Land" for the gales of the Arctic Ocean. The weather was fearful! Snow, sleet, hurricanes, treacherous heavy squalls, followed each other in succession. "This is the winter weather we have here," said the captain; "we do not expect any better at this time of the year.
And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more. His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. 'His totem is the wolf, she repeated to herself.
The clouds that cast their moisture upon this long line of upheaven rocks seek again the ocean which gave them birth in its far-separated divisions of Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic.
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