They worked hard over making this muddle; they took two mortal hours over it, and frequently called upon us for assistance; but finally they limbered up with the help of abundance of thongs of reindeer hide and rope, and we put backs to the river and set off on our march.
The first halt came at the end of the first three hundred yards; a load had very naturally began to shift, and they all sat down to readjust it. The second halt came at the quarter mile, and then the stoppages became more frequent. We came to a standstill eight several times before we had covered the first mile, and expended exactly two hours and a half of time in doing it. And as during all this time the sun was blazing upon us with scorching force and the mosquitoes were biting like dogs, we were not unspeakably happy.
This start up to the fjeld was over sandy river-beds, through streams, swamps, and neck-high scrub. A month earlier the country had been under snow; a week before the tree buds had not burst; and here were dwarf birches and the Arctic willows in full leaf, and barely so much as a patch of white left even in the crannies of the distant hills. The Arctic summer has a great deal of work to get through in a very short space of time, and rushes its climatic effects. But, worst of all, the mosquito season had opened ten days before, and was in full swing. And such mosquitoes! Their cousins of Africa and the Southern States were nothing to them. They came in their milliards, gaunt gray fellows, without one grain of fear for death. They got their trunks inserted in some unlucky pore, and presently their bodies, from the wing-sockets backwards, would grow into transparent scarlet blobs. We were covered with blood splashes from slaying these vampires, and sore with slapping at them; but it was some selfish consolation to see that the men of the place suffered equally. Each of the Finns carried a bottle of brown Stockholm tar, which dangled from the waist-belt against his knife, and with the contents of this he liberally anointed both face and hands. But this did little more than convert the wearer into an animated fly-trap. We employed tar for the complexion ourselves till we were nearly through to the other side of the country, and then we gave it up and used it for the boots alone, and noted no difference in our discomforts. We had veils each of us, but these were not often available. They got entangled by passing shrubs; the enemy would get inside once every minute or so, however carefully the edges were tucked in, and this entailed a hunt and a blood splash, and, finally, the mesh blurred the view, which was a fatal objection.