Now Vardö was not what we had come so far to see, or smell. We wanted to get started on our travel in Arctic Lapland as quickly as might be; and as soon as the whale-boat had set us ashore amongst the fish litter on one of the wharves, we set about pushing inquiries as far as they would go.
The success we met with in this pursuit was not brilliant. In fact the results might be catalogued as almost entirely negative.
In the first instance the horse-bubble was pricked once and for all. Lapland, it appeared, was largely made up of swamps and lakes and rivers, and we were gravely informed that the horse was not a navigable animal. If we wanted to get through, we must walk and wade where that was possible, and canoe or raft the rest; and it was suggested that if we wished to ensure success, we had better in addition borrow two pairs of good reliable wings to help us. Anything we wished to take with us must be borne about our own persons or carried on the backs of hired men. And this was about all the definite information we could arrive at. The cause of the deficit was simple: during the summer months, communication across the interior was entirely interrupted, and Vardö could not be expected to know much about a journey which was never done.
In winter, when the snow crust hardened, and the rivers and the lakes were roofed with massive ice, then movement about the country was a comparatively easy thing. There were recognised routes, and the traveller could pack himself into one of the boat-like, reindeer sledges, and move along over the frozen surface at from six to ten miles per hour, and be sure of relays of deer at certain appointed stations. But in summer the deer were away deep in the fjelds, fattening on the ivory-yellow moss; they were useless to travel with through swamps and across deep open water, and the mosquitoes would have maddened them if they had been tried; and, in consequence, the natives of the interior bowed to the inevitable. They just stayed in their farms, or their fishing-camps, or their herd-stations, and worked during the brief summer months to store up food against the long grim frozen night of winter.
At first, then, it was pointed out to us that we were proposing to do an impossibility, and it was suggested that we should either wait in Vardö till the snows came and sledges could be used, or abandon the Lapland expedition and go off to explore the Petchora, or visit that fascinatingly unknown island, Novaya Zemblya. We quite saw the charm of these two last alternatives, and made arrangements for riving the secrets from Novaya Zemblya some other season, and thinning its flocks of deer and polar bears, and charting the Matoskin Skyar; but for the present Lapland was what our souls hankered after, and we had got to get there somehow.
