It was not altogether country that would have suited a bicyclist. There were rivers to plod through, and swamps to clog one, cliffs to scramble up and down, and thickets to disarrange one's personal appearance, and most effectually to tear a mosquito veil if one had been worn. As a main direction, we were heading east along the flank of a steep valley, with hills on one side and a deep river on the other, which sometimes broke up into noisy rapids. As a general thing the trees closed us in, but now and again we got out on to rising ground, and found a view which it was worth stopping to look at.
The pace of our caravan now, was very different from that detestable slouch we had been forced to put up with at the north of Enare See. We logged off a good steady four miles to the hour, and after the first stop (which always comes early on a march, to get the loads finally adjusted) halts were pleasingly infrequent. The two Lapps were the willingest fellows on earth, and the solitary, high-booted Finn, although he was a poorer creature, was forced to keep up with his better's lead. The elder Lapp, who headed the advance, was a melancholy-faced man of some personal beauty. He had lost his wife a few months before, had had his house burnt on the top of that, and so found himself, in middle life, changed from a prosperous family man to a homeless widower; and these things do not tend to cheer a man. He was a dull, capable servant, but we could not bring ourselves to like him.
Johann, the younger Lapp, was a very different animal. We took him to be aged eighteen, though he turned out afterwards to be ten years older than that estimate. He stood about four feet ten inches high in his _lappellinin_, and the full curve of his bandy legs was charmingly exhibited by the skin-tight white-flannel garments which covered them. He had a quaintly ugly face, beardless as a girl's, and thatched above by a fell of coarse, black hair; and with his gaily-piped _matsoreo_ off and packed against his load (as he always carried it on the march), and a tight, striped jersey covering his upper man, he was an exact reproduction of the peripatetic acrobat one comes across at English fairs and seaside summer beaches. Indeed one could never quite get over the idea that he was merely playing the part of carrier for a joke, and that some day, quite unexpectedly, he would doff his load, produce a square of threadbare carpet, and go through some entertaining contortions, and afterwards hand round his wooden coffee-bowl for coppers.