There was underground drainage in many parts of the fjeld which we passed over here. Hollows abounded like those one sees on the limestone hills of Yorkshire, where cave-roofs have fallen in. But we found neither pot-holes nor cave-openings. Lakes were many. We frequently had to climb round their sides at the foot of steep, smooth cliffs of sandstone, and then again to scramble over hard outcrops of the same rock on the dry ground beyond. The birches were gone. Instead a forest began to grow of weedy, straggling, dishevelled pines, bare in stalk, and showing but little greenery. And always where stone was not, the ivory-yellow moss covered the ground with its dry, crisp carpet. Occasionally, too, sprouts of mountain-ash appeared, but these were rare, and they never grew thicker than a finger, or taller than a grown man's waist. And still the birds kept off: we saw old spoor of reindeer here and there in the softer ground; but of four-footed creatures in the flesh and fur, nothing but tiny lemmings.
Meanwhile the lakes were growing larger, and the rivers which linked them more deep and broad. Enare See as it appears on the maps--even on the best map, which is that of Russian survey--is large; but Enare See as it exists in Arctic Lapland is larger by one half. It is no great sheet of open water like Michigan or Ontario; there is barely one stretch of unbroken water twelve miles square in all its hundred and twenty miles of length; and it is hard to say where the lake ends and where it begins. There are islands all over its great expanse, and the mainland round is cut up by lakes and water channels. In fact, just as some one once defined a fishing-net as "a lot of holes tied together with string," so Enare See might well be described as a collection of land patches made into islands by water.
Our course swung through half the points of the compass as the water channels swerved to this side and that, or the fords lay to our right or left, and those exasperating carriers grew slower in their pace, and more frequent in their halts, and we had resigned ourselves to another fifteen solid hours of torment, when a great streak of luck befell us. Between some bushes at the side of a long narrow lake there lay a canoe.
