We got into talk with one of these builders, and he told us a strange thing. He said that a week before he had chanced to look up from his work, and saw something "like an enormous bird without wings" move quickly across the clearing far above his head. It was coloured green, and he guessed it to be some sixty feet in length. Round its neck was a big projecting ring, which made a whirring noise. He had never seen anything of the like before, and did not know what to make of it. Could we give an explanation?
Well we had ideas on the subject--distinct ideas--but we did not let them out just then. This seemed very much the same thing that Johann had talked about, describing it as a green fish, and which we had discussed together over so many marches afterwards; and now we wanted to know more about it. But that was all the builder could tell. He was a man of fair intelligence, but he had only seen the thing for a very few seconds, and had not gathered anything but a general impression. We asked him if it was an air-ship, but that was a conception he could not understand. He was certain, however, that he had seen no men on the concern, though there was plenty of room for men inside--for twenty men for the matter of that; and he was equally certain the whole thing was not an illusion of the senses. He had seen what he said, neither more nor less, and he stuck to it doggedly. And having said his say, he got up, and took an axe and set it on the grindstone preparatory to work.
We got our caravan under way again after that, and perfunctorily tried to talk on what we had heard; but the labours of the journey and the horrible mosquito-plague were too heavy to give mere empty speculation much of a chance. And when later on we discerned that the travellers with the leg-shackles we had met at Scurujärvi had not been at either Küstula or Kittila, as they asserted, then the subject got a new interest. We connected them, somehow or other, with this mysterious air-ship--we had convinced ourselves it was an air-ship by then--and formed a thousand theories as to what might be their business. I wonder if at any time we guessed anywhere near the truth?
A drenching dew came down as the night wore on, and the mosquitoes lessened somewhat in their maddening attentions, and we marched a trifle more easily. But we carried the marks of their work written on us in ugly letters. Our arms were swollen from wrist to elbow, so that they fitted tight in the gloves; we were bitten, bitten, bitten all over, through corduroy, under boot-laces, under hair. The scraps of paper in my pocket, on which I had been scribbling notes, were splodged with blood till they were unreadable, and in this torment we had been marching for ten consecutive hours before the dew came and brought relief.