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Overjoyed by remarkable achievements of American Bahá’í Community, safeguarding primacy, enhancing prestige, setting magnificent example to sister communities East and West. Assure three Assembly members, also Lofoten valiant pioneer of abiding appreciation, fervent loving prayers. Heartfelt congratulations on acquisition of Temple site; notable achievement of World Crusade.
At table, he felt ashamed of every mouthful he took; he hunted for jobs as day-labourer on distant farms so as to earn a little to help pay for his keep. And when the winter came he would have to do as the others did hire himself out, young and small as he was, for the Lofoten fishing. But one day after church Klaus Brock drew him aside and got him to talk things over at length.
Meantime, the effect upon himself is seen and avowed. Between Svoermere and Benoni comes the frankly first-personal narrative of a vagabond who describes himself, upon interrogation, as "Knut Pedersen" which is two-thirds of Knut Pedersen Hamsund and hailing from Nordland which embraces Lofoten.
But surely he had seen all this before? Ah! now he knew; it was the Lofoten Sea over again with its white foam-crested combers and long-drawn, heavy-breathing swell a rolling ocean turned to rock. Peer halted a moment leaning on his stick, and his eyes half-closed. Could he not feel that same ocean-swell rising and sinking in his own being?
The passengers were chiefly Norwegians, most of whom were bound for the Lofoten Islands, where the great annual fair was about to be held. In the saloon my companions from Trondhjem were two young Frenchmen, bent, like myself, upon visiting the North Cape, and an Austrian, attached to the Court at Vienna, who, for some inscrutable reason, was fired with the same ambition.
The story was as follows: On Kvalholmen, in Helgeland, there lived a poor fisherman named Elias, with his wife Karen, who had formerly been servant at the minister's over at Alstadhaug. They had put up a cottage at Kvalholmen, and Elias was now in the Lofoten fishing-trade, working for daily wages. It was pretty evident that lonely Kvalholmen was haunted.
"Mercy on us!" cry the maids, for it is milking-time, and they have to fight their way on hands and knees across the yard to the cowshed, dragging a lantern that WILL go out and a milk-pail that WON'T be held. And "Lord preserve us!" mutter the old wives seated round the stove within doors and their thoughts are far away in the north with the Lofoten fishermen, out at sea, maybe, this very night.
About Christmas-time that winter in our part of Lofoten there were a number of foreigners, mostly ships' captains, who, on account of bad weather or damage to their vessels, were staying at different places on shore, as Martinez was with us. There were also notabilities from the south on public business.
But if Nature's great power, brooding with crushing weight over life on this wintry, surf-beat, iron-bound coast, which lies in twilight for nine months, and for three of these altogether loses the sun, creates a terror of darkness in the mind, yet the north also possesses in the same extreme the exactly opposite character, a warm, sunny, summer nature, clear-aired, heavily scented, rich with the changing beauty of countless colours; in which objects at ten or twelve miles' distance across the sea-mirror, seem to approach within speaking-distance; in which the mountains clothe themselves with brownish green grass to the very top in Lofoten to a height of 2000 feet in which the small birch woods wreathe themselves up on the slopes and ravines, like white, sixteen-year-old maidens at play; in which too the air is laden, as in no other place, with the scent of the growing strawberries and raspberries there, and when the day is so hot, that you are compelled to walk in shirt-sleeves, and you are longing to bathe in the rippling sea, always saturated with sunshine, and perfectly clear to the very bottom.
As evening fell, he saw a multitude of lights spread out on every side far ahead in the darkness. And next, with his little wooden chest on his shoulder, he was finding his way up through the streets by the quay to a lodging-house for country folk, which he knew from former visits, when he had come to the town with the Lofoten boats.
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