1936 On the Continent

firs, and high up in the sky was apin-prick of light, so remote that it was impossible to say whether it was a star or a light in the window of some
seter
where folk still kept with the herds until the final break of the weather should send them hurrying to the valleys again.
    All the tracks that lead westwards into the mountain fastnesses of the Jotunheim from this part of the Sjoa valley have been trodden by the peasant feet of centuries. Sometimes the way winds eerily through the depths of the forests, where one moves soundlessly over the carpet of pine needles to stumble dramatically upon an elk or see the great shape of a capercailzie wing heavily through the trees; sometimes the path follows the line of the rivers. But always the route ascends, until the forests thin and at last abruptly end on a tree-limit that is as sharply defined as though the trees had been felled by human agency on the edge of the desolate upland wastes.
    And then, with the trees dropping out of sight behind, there is only a wild humped world of moorland ahead; and beyond that again a horizon of dim blue mountain shapes and the white sheen of snow and the glint of glaciers.
Norway of Peer Gynt
    It took us four days’ tramping, averaging fifteen miles a day, to reach Gjendesheim, on the rim of the Jotunheim fastnesses. Each night we had camped by a lake or beside a river. We had called at many a
seter
and been welcomed and given milk and cheese.
    Here at Gjendesheim, in the rest-house of the Norwegian Tourist Association (Den Norske Turistforening) we were in the heart of the Norway of Peer Gynt. It was over the rugged heights of the Besseggen and the Besshö that the central figure of Ibsen’s verse and Grieg’s immortal music roamed. Here among the peasant villages that huddle beneath the mountains he rioted and drank and danced and made love.
    The gentle sound of every little stream seems to hold the soft music of
Solveig’s Song
. The moaning of the waterfalls as they force their way between the river rocks holds all the splendid tragedy of
Ase’s Death
.
Beyond the Arctic Circle
    The ships of the Norwegian
hurtigruten
, the fast passenger-mail-cargo steamers that ply along the enormous twistinglength of Norway’s coast, from Bergen to Kirkenes, cover one of the most dramatic sea-routes of the world.
    In summer their way lies through waters which the Midnight Sun keeps in perpetual daylight. In winter they plough their way, with the ice clinging to their rope-work and rails, beneath skies lit with the uncanny green flashing of the Northern Lights.
    The journey takes a week, and in making it you travel five hundred miles beyond the Arctic Circle and steam round the gable-tip of Europe, where the black granite snouts of the North Cape and Cape Nordkyn stab sullenly out into the cold grey swell of the Barentz Sea.
    The ship’s final anchorage at the town of Kirkenes is in the innermost recess of a fjord which is only separated from the immensity of Russia by eight miles of Norwegian soil and a thin, straggling strip of Finland.
Low Temperatures
    Press work took me to those parts in the depth of winter. There was a big birchwood fire burning in the open
peis
of the living-room in the villa in Bergen where I was spending a few hours before the
hurtigruten
left in the evening. Outside the streets were deep in snow. There were about seven degrees of frost (Celsius) registered by the little thermometer fixed outside the window of double glass. A sleigh went by laden with barrels of beer, chased by two urchins on skis who were racing to catch up and get a tow. A cold scene, with the memory of a mild February day in London only 28 hours old.
    But it was nothing, I knew, to what lay ahead. Up in Kirkenes, the paper recorded, the temperature was −43°; and in the streets of Vardö, one of the most northerly towns of Norway, an old woman had been found frozen dead in an outhouse.
    At eight o’clock that night the
Irma
slid out of Bergen and turned north through the intricate channels between the islands on the first stage of her long journey to the Polar rim.
    Ålesund was reached next morning, the town from which comes nine-tenths of the dried fish you see for sale in the shops and markets of the Mediterranean towns. Then Molde, which Björnson loved; and Trondheim, whereSaint Olaf sleeps beneath the altar of the great cathedral. And on the fourth morning out from Bergen the
Irma
slewed to the little wooden jetty of Indre Kvaröy, a