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From Chapter 1
Odin's
Messengers 14 October 1899 Finnmark,
Northern Norway, within the Arctic Circle
It
is true of the northern lights, as of many other
things of which we have no sure knowledge, that
thoughtful men will form opinions and conjectures
about it and will make such guesses as seem
reasonable. But these northern lights have this
peculiar nature, that the darker the night is, the
brighter they seem, and they always appear at night
but never by day, and rarely by moonlight. They
resemble a vast flame of fire viewed from a great
distance. It also looks as if sharp points were shot
from this flame up into the sky, they are of uneven
height and in constant motion, now one, now another
darting highest; and the light appears to blaze like
a living flame . . . ---kongespeilet (The
King's Mirror), c. 1220-30, Norse epic
It was
ten in the morning and -25° Celsius when the
group left the small mining town of Kaafjord for the
summit of Haldde Mountain, Haldde being a Lappish
word for "guardian spirit." The cold should
have scattered the clouds but halfway to the top the
wind engulfed the men in blinding eddies of snow and
ice. Their guide, Clement Isaakson Hætta, was a
Lapp who had abandoned the traditional activity of
herding reindeer to become the local postman serving
the few Norwegians, Swedes, and immigrant workers
from Finland, the Kvens, living in this northerly
outpost. Short, with bandy legs, he bent his body at
the hips into a right angle and pushed on through the
storm like a swaying battering ram. Firmly wrapped
around his wrist were the leather reins of the
leading reindeer that was struggling to pull a sled
piled high with a bizarre cargo of instrument boxes,
trunks, and tripods. Seven reindeer, similarly yoked,
were lashed behind the leader, and roped to them were
five huddled figures.
Directly behind
Hætta was the instigator of the expedition,
Kristian Olaf Birkeland. He yelled to the guide above
the screeching wind wanting to know whether it was
safe to continue. He could not hear the response, as
the storm scrambled Hætta's words and Birkeland
was partly deaf from conducting noisy radio-wave
experiments as a student. Festooned with reindeer
skins, he appeared shorter than his five feet five
inches. Only thirty-one years old, he was already
balding across the dome of his fine-boned scalp. The
snow stuck to his round spectacles but he had long
given up scraping ice off the lenses and instead
squinted between the rims and his fur hood. This
unlikely adventurer had been made a professor of
Norway's only university one year previously. He was
the youngest of his colleagues in the Faculty of
Science and Mathematics, his prophetic genius as a
scientist emerging in his twenties when he solved
problems that had defeated some of the brightest
minds in Europe. Despite his youth, Birkeland was not
a fit man; he loathed physical hardship and was more
accustomed to long hours in the laboratory, hunched
over diagrams and experiments. It was a comment on
his devotion to scientific discovery that he was
stranded on a mountain in eighty-kilometer-an-hour
winds that howled continuously.
The storm was
worsening; the men had been walking for six hours and
had covered a distance that would take only two in
good conditions. The guide shuffled onward, chewing
on black tobacco, damp wads of which he spat into the
wind. To reach the summit of the mountain, and the
hut that would provide them with shelter, it was
necessary to leave the narrow plateau they were
traversing and climb the exposed mountainside. The
peak they were heading toward was engulfed in a mass
of swirling snow and ice as dense as black
smoke.
Roped behind a breathless Birkeland
came Bjorn Helland-Hansen, a gifted student in the
medical department of Christiania University who was
training to be a surgeon. Talented in science as well
as medicine, he had attended Birkeland's lecture
course and been inspired to join him on this
adventure. He had just celebrated his twenty-second
birthday. Tied to him was Elisar Boye, a Latin
scholar who had been the first to volunteer for the
expedition, presenting himself just a few hours after
Birkeland posted a notice on the boards in the main
hall of the university, requesting strong and able
science students for a unique expedition to the
Arctic Circle. At first Birkeland had thought that a
Latin graduate would be of little use to him on a
scientific mission, but Boye explained that he had
achieved the best mark possible in mathematics, and
eventually Birkeland relented in the face of the
young man's enthusiasm. Boye looked much younger than
his twenty-two years, with a smooth, pale complexion
and clear blue eyes, on this day hidden inside his
reindeer hood. He had stopped trying to see where he
was going through the lashing snow and simply
followed the direction of the tugging rope. Behind
Boye came Kristoffer Knudsen, a twenty-three-year-old
telegraphic engineer who had been working for the
Norwegian railway until Birkeland lured him away with
promises of adventure and pioneering science. He did
not know the other members of the group and was the
quietest when they began the ascent. As the storm
intensified, he retreated ever further into his
jacket and squinted at the ground immediately before
his feet through the hairs of his hood. The tallest
in the party, Sem Sæland, brought up the rear.
Just turned twenty-five, Sæland had studied
mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry at the
university, then traveled to Iceland, where he spent
a year teaching before returning to Christiania
University for further studies. There he met
Birkeland, and was so interested in the professor's
ideas that he had volunteered to join him on his
expedition. Sæland repeatedly checked the knot
in the rope linking him to the others as the driving
snow was so thick he could see no more than a few
centimeters beyond his nose.
By four o'clock
the light was fading. Hætta decided that they
should turn round and head back down the mountain,
but then immediately changed his mind, suggesting
they continue to the hut as it could not be more than
two kilometers away and it would be more difficult to
go down than up. He cajoled and harried the reindeer,
which would not face the wind and nervously shook
their heads at the sharp points of ice pricking their
eyes and noses. It was impossible to sit in the sleds
as they lay so close to the ground that the men were
pelted with ice and small stones. Soon some of the
reindeer lay down flat and refused to move.
Hætta, a large part of his face white with
frostbite, followed their lead and threw himself onto
his sled, declaring he could go no further and could
not find the way forward. He told Birkeland to
continue without him, keeping the wind in his face,
but the professor knew that abandoning their guide
would be a fatal mistake and told the group to make
camp as best they could. Hætta crawled under his
sled while the others dragged the remaining sleds and
baggage to form a barricade, behind which they
erected a low tent. They struggled into their
reindeer sleeping bags with all possible haste while
Helland-Hansen weighed down the guy ropes with boxes
and trunks. By the time he entered the tent less than
five minutes later, the tips of his fingers had
turned white with frostbite.
For twenty hours
the five men lay in the cramped tent. They rubbed
Helland-Hansen's fingers every quarter of an hour in
an attempt to bring them back to life, and almost as
regularly one of the five men had to push snow from
the roof of the tent to prevent the suffocation of
all those inside. Wherever there was a little shelter
the snow heaped into thick, compact drifts that would
trap them in a freezing vise if allowed to settle.
They had nothing to drink or warm themselves with,
having been assured by Hætta that the ascent was
a matter of six hours' gentle climbing with a short,
steep section at the summit. Birkeland had half a
loaf of bread in his jacket that he tossed to Hansen
in the darkness, hoping some food might distract him
from the pain in his hands, but the noise of the wind
was so great that he did not hear Birkeland yelling
to him to eat the bread, and it froze to the
consistency of rock within a few minutes. Gradually
the little light that glowed through the snow-filled
air was extinguished by the black night that fell by
five o'clock. Inside the tent Birkeland was painfully
aware that only a thin strip of canvas trembled
between them and the lethal storm outside; one fierce
gust and it could be ripped off. Without the tent
they would be unlikely to survive.
The men lay
shivering in their sleeping bags, dozing fitfully
through the night but being frequently awoken by
particularly violent blasts of wind and ice or by
hunger and thirst. They had put a bucket of snow
inside the tent in the hope that it would melt with
their body heat and they would have water to drink,
but it remained frozen. Birkeland felt responsible
for the safety of his talented charges who had
followed him on this hazardous expedition. Aware that
this area sometimes experienced week-long tempests of
unbroken ferocity, he worried throughout the night
about how they could survive if the storm continued
the next day. Lying awake listening to the air
howling through the mountain pass and over their
tent, he waited for the slightest sign that the
gale-force winds were easing.
At ten the
following morning Birkeland untied one of the leather
strings holding down the tent flap but could see no
more than a meter ahead. Not until midday did the
wind abate sufficiently to risk venturing out.
Birkeland banged on Hætta's sled to make sure
the postman was still alive. Hætta shouted in
reply that he was too cold to move but Birkeland
insisted that they take advantage of the lull. Camp
was struck, the sleds reloaded, and a reluctant
Hætta once again led the group onward. They had
only a few hours of daylight left to make the ascent,
and without food and water it was imperative they
find the shelter.
As the six men trudged on,
the snow finally stopped and only tiny ice crystals
spun in the eddies of wind left behind by the fierce
zephyrs now en route to central Finnmark, Kautokeino,
and the Lapp reindeer camps of the plains. The clouds
dispersed as quickly as they had arrived, and in the
gathering twilight the Pole Star appeared, reassuring
and constant. Without the cloud cover the cold
intensified rapidly, and moisture frosted on their
lips, while their breath trailed behind them in
crystal plumes. The drifting snow made walking in
boots impossible, so the men strapped small skis to
their feet. The undersurface of the skis was covered
in reindeer skin in such a way that gliding forward
was easy but the hairs sticking in the snow prevented
them from slipping backwards. Nearly two hours later
they reached a gently sloping plateau at the foot of
the summit. Hætta pointed to the top of the
peak. In the deepening twilight the group could
faintly discern the shape of a small building. The
sky was almost dark and the final slope was littered
with sharp, icy rocks and narrow crevices. The
reindeer coughed and snorted with the effort of
pulling the heavy sleds up the incline and the group
stopped frequently to allow them to rest. At the
steepest sections, the men put their weight behind
the sleds and pushed with all their failing strength
as the delicate-limbed reindeer slipped and scrabbled
on the icy rocks and patchy snow. After twenty
minutes of backbreaking struggle the exhausted group
arrived at a small area of smooth snow, a ledge of
flat ground at the base of the final peak. Above them
stood their sanctuary, a black shape against an inky
sky.
In the dark the men could discern a small
stone building with wooden steps leading up to the
doorway in a low tower. After struggling to crack
away the ice that had sealed the door to the jamb,
Birkeland managed to get inside. It was nearly seven
o'clock by the time the stove was lit and a bucket of
snow brought in to thaw. Hansen immersed his hands in
it in the hope that the frostbite could still be
reversed. The others unpacked the sleds and staggered
up the slope with the boxes and bags.
As the
last of the packages were carried in and Hætta
tethered the reindeer, a crack appeared in the night.
On the eastern horizon the darkness was splitting to
reveal a gentle, tremulous luminescence-just a
sliver, a streak. One by one the men stood still on
the summit and stared at the vision appearing before
them. The streamer of light began to move toward them
in a huge arc across the heavens, pulsating and
writhing as it advanced. The streak became a pennant
with points of light coursing down in parallel lines
like the strings of a harp, attached at one end to
heaven and at the other to the sinuous curve of light
as it crept from horizon to horizon. Then another
bolt of the green-white light stretched out beside
the first and both arced together. Even more wildly
the strings were plucked and the shapes changed to
the music-now curling, now forming great circles,
then breaking again to roll away to join another arc
of green-white light. No one spoke. The hairs on the
backs of their necks stood up, as if awoken by static
electricity. Birkeland understood for the first time
why the Lights had defied neat explanation: they
appeared not to belong to Earth but to space.
Seemingly beyond human comprehension, they reached
straight into the souls of those who witnessed them
as an appearance of the angelic host or the Holy
Spirit might do. The glowing banners in the sky were
so entrancing that the group forgot the cold and
remained outside, entering the hut occasionally to
eat or drink but re-emerging to watch the
breathtaking display dancing over their heads. Only
HÆtta did not look. He took the reins and bells
off his animals and went into the hut without an
upward glance.
For the Lapps, the Northern
Lights were a fierce and powerful presence. They were
the messengers of God, to be respected and feared.
HÆtta had removed the harnesses from the
reindeer to avoid attracting their attention, for
Lapps believed that whistling, waving handkerchiefs,
or the sound of tinkling bells would provoke the
Lights into attacking the offender. Stories abounded
of Lapps who ignored this warning being struck down,
their charred reindeer jackets remaining as a warning
to others. The Lapps would chant a special rhyme
repeatedly if they feared that they had angered the
Lights:
The northern light, the northern
light
Flickering, flickering,
Hammer in
its leg
Birch bark in its hand.
Excerpted from The Northern Lights by
Lucy Jago
Copyright 2001 by Lucy Jago. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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