1936 On the Continent

desolate small settlement of a few fishermen’s houses, that lies almost exactly on the Arctic Circle.
    I went ashore there. Though the influence of the Gulf Stream keeps the sea free of ice even to the North Cape, the water piles up into frozen blue masses once it strikes the cold rocks of the shore. Here at Indre Kvaröy the sea edge was sculptured in ice waves, and an utter stillness hung over the little world of this small island that is a milestone of the world’s curvature.
    A white sea-eagle hovered in the leaden sky. Some eider duck floated motionless in the bitter cold sound. Over the snow, through which a few stunted Arctic ash pushed their short stems and cretinous branches, three gaunt hoody crows flapped with a kind of witch-like sinisterness.
    But one of the wooden houses huddled round the jetty had a weather-whipped sign above its door on which the word
Kaffistova
could be faintly traced where the Arctic winds had left a few touches of paint unflayed.
    It was good to sit inside by the iron stove with a mug of steaming coffee and listen to the small-talk of the place.
Tragedy
    “
Nei, for oss heroppe vinteren er ikke god
,” an old fellow admitted. But hard though the winter was, they were not being so cruelly put to it in Indre Kvaröy as folk were in some of the remoter islands. There were places he knew of where people were scraping the birch bark off their dwindling stocks of firewood in order to boil it into something resembling soup.
    “Have the storms been bad? Have there been many wrecks?” I asked. And he nudged me with his boot as the girl brought some coffee to someone at the next table.
    She was a pretty girl, plumpish, with a fair, smooth skin and calm blue eyes. She had the serenity of all peasants. And something more than serenity, I sensed, as I watched her. She smiled quietly at some sally the young man she was serving made, and then I saw the look of ineffable sadness in her eyes. When she moved away again my informant spoke.
    “Wrecks?” he said softly … “Ragnhild there—she comes from Melöy, farther north—lost her lover and father and brother in November. They went out to fish towards Lofoten and never came back.”
    That night we crossed the sixty-miles wide Vestfjord, which lies between the mainland of Norway and the lonely archipelago of the Lofoten Islands. The Northern Lights were brilliant. In huge green and yellow and purple sweeps, in vast folds of colour like a great curtain hanging from the sky, in jagged clumps of a million bright spear-points, they moved across the clear, starry heavens.
    Here and there the red and green navigation lights of fishing craft pricked the darkness as the little boats chugged across to Lofoten, that Eldorado of the winter cod fisheries—that may bring fortune or may bring death.
“Terrible Beauty”
    After leaving Svolvaer, the bleak little capital of the Lofoten Islands, the steamers of the
hurtigruten
wind their way along the shores of Finmark, the province of the Lapps, to Hammerfest. A few miles beyond that city, the most northerly in the world, tree life ceases. This is the latitude of Alaska, and the last tree of Europe is a gallant dwarf birch that has fixed its wiry roots in a rock crevice.
    This desolate coast of northernmost Norway has a fierce, terrible beauty. Inland, the snows undulate endlessly. Seawards, the “ice-smoke” hovers in a mist over the waters that spread unbrokenly to Spitzbergen and the polar ice barrier.
    But even here there are towns on the edge of the Arctic vacuum. Vardö, to which the winds slash straight from Siberia, has its communal cinema and the Hotel Nordpol, most suitably named. At Vadsö, reindeer sleighs are driven down to the quay to collect the mails and take passengers to hamlets further inland; and the local lasses wear long Lapp boots over their silk stockings.
    And at Kirkenes, the ultimate town of Norway, you can have a meal to the accompaniment of radio music from the cafés of Oslo, 1,200 miles away; and then go outside and be within earshot of a wolf howling out in the snowy wilderness beneath the Pole Star.
Winter Sports in Norway
    In Norway skis have formed the normal winter method of foot transport from the earliest Viking times. Ski-jumping and the finesses of the various turns and forms of racing have developed into their present-day highly technical sports aspect from beginnings of ordinary winter necessity. In Norway people ski because they have to in order to get