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CHAPTER VII.
Anomaly of climate—Alten—Fashion and gaiety in the arctic regions
—Hammerfest—A hint for railway directors—Floating colony
of Fisher Lapps—Open-air bedrooms—Live dolls—Capital of the
Fjeld Lapp—The Thief Mountain—Wine in the far north—The
great meridian line from the Danube to the Arctic Ocean—A
cruel defeat and humiliation—Improvement in travelling
Englishmen—Folly of ostentatious lavisliness—The return journey—
Glaciers of the Nus Fiord—A public breakfast at Tromsö.
The scenery of the banks of the Alten Fiord is
curiously summer-like, and verdant in many parts;
especially upon the Kaafiord, which is the inmost
portion of the Alten Fiord. This, combined with a
bright sky, a scorching sun, and an atmosphere of a
softness suitable for a consumptive patient, renders it
difficult to believe oneself in latitude 70°, and nearly
400 miles due north of Tornea. The journey from Alten
to Tornea (430 miles by the track), during the whole
of which the traveller is proceeding nearly due south,
presents the remarkable anomaly of a climate of
continually increasing severity as he proceeds southwards.
In the winter he travels from the open sea of the
Norwegian coast to the head of the frozen Gulf of Bothnia.
In the summer the thermometer sometimes rises to
87° in the shade, and in the winter it rarely, if ever, falls
below zero; when, in other parts of the globe with the
same latitude, mercury freezes. This village of Alten,
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