We walked on up the bank of the river to the Falls of the Neiden, where the best salmon pools lie. There was a Russian chapel on the way--a rude, bare cabin of naked logs, with a shuttered window, and a three-armed cross on one of its gables. The lower arm of these crosses is always on the slant, as by Russian tradition Christ had one leg shorter than the other. The Finns and Norwegians round here are Lutherans to a man, and they look upon everything outside Lutheranism as degrading superstition. So naturally they do nothing to keep the chapel in repair. And the stray Lapps from the Russian side, to whom it belongs, are too miserably poor to notice much the chapel's squalor and wretchedness.
There was a graveyard round this lonely fane of an alien faith--a bare, unenclosed patch of mounds, each surmounted by an axe, or shovel, or some implement used by the departed during his earthly life, and it struck me that heathendom and Christianity are sometimes very closely akin. Not a year before I had seen graves in Central African villages similarly decorated.
Farther on were the falls; and though they were too long to be impressive from a mere jaded sight-seer's point of view, they were most appetising when we considered the pools and rapids with the eye of a fisher for salmon. And here again was another grave, that of a man carried down the river from above, and stranded dank and drowned on a jutting rock of the foss. There was no headstone to speak of his fate and virtues, the mouldering remains of the usual overground coffin showed the manner of his sepulture. We laid the compass on the mound, and found it was orientated accurately magnetic east and west, not allowing for the variation.
So the man had been buried with care and Christian hands, and not bundled into a box and covered up where he lay. And yet he had not been thought worth taking down to one of the Lutheran graveyards on the lower fjords. We wondered much what his story might be, but we could form no very reasonable hypothesis, nor could we find any person round there in the Neiden district who would tell us. They all reddened and said they did not know.
There was a quaintly cumbersome pipe on this lonely grave, and as it happened we were both collectors of the curious in smoking utensils. It was a temptation to carry it away. Let it be recounted then as something of a small virtue that we left the pipe where it lay.