In the harbour, steamers from France, and Hamburg, and lower Norway, load bales of the dried cod, which will carry the aroma of Vardö as far as Bremen, Brest, and St. Petersburg.
As wooden places go, the town itself is not uncomely. It is built on an island, which is nearly cut in two by the fjords that form the harbour, and it has two principal streets running at right angles to one another, and others again branching off these. The houses are of all colours from ochre to gray, and all sizes, and all architectures. There are roses and stocks and geraniums showing from behind the windows. The older roofs are green with grass, and dotted with the flowers of buttercup and clover. Some are roofed with turf alone. Goats feed on the roofs, and ladders lead up to them, so that the owners can pull off burning rafters in case of a fire. There are goats in the streets too, snuffling amongst the disused fish.
Once the town was a strong place, but the star-shaped fort, which was built in 1735, is to-day obsolete, though field-guns and some breech-loaders on slides still grin through the embrasures, and the garrison of fifteen men take it in orderly turns to hoist the Norwegian flag. The racks of drying fish carcasses run along the side of its ramp, and bristling nosegays of cods' heads dangle on either side of its main entrance.
There are other towns of Norway given up to the cult of the cod, but nowhere is it so entirely the one staple of commerce as in this ancient settlement so far within the Arctic Circle. The tail of the Gulf Stream keeps its climate equable. It is never very hot and never very cold, and in this it differs vastly from the interior of the continent to the southward, where both extremes prevail; and if it has to put up with a six months' night in the winter of the year, with only a slight lightening of the gloom at midday to tell that the sun is still somewhere in the universe to keep the world a-move, at the same time it has another six months when all lamps can be dismantled and put away, and day burns high all round the clock and round again.
But the summer is the time when commerce bristles. It is then that the larger merchants toil to make their wealth; and when the lamps begin to kindle in the windows, they take the mail steamers and go away to follow the retiring sun. Some merely retreat to Tromsö, some to Bergen, some to Petersburg; but there are others who go to Italy and Southern Europe; and there is one who washes the cod-stink from him, and dons the garb of fashion, and winter after winter hies him to a tiny principality on the Riviera, where they keep a roulette bank, which it is his mood to try and break. The gambling rooms down there are cosmopolitan, certainly, but I wonder how many people have guessed that they usually contain a stock-fish prince who gets his wealth from the chilly Polar sea?