an
answering shot, and, in the space of a second, the air was filled with
birds, thicker than autumn leaves, and rang with one universal, clanging
shriek. A second shot, followed by a second outcry and an answering
discharge from the other caverns, almost darkened the sky. The whirring,
rustling and screaming, as the birds circled overhead, or dropped like
thick scurries of snow-flakes on the water, was truly awful. There could
not have been less than fifty thousand in the air at one time, while as
many more clung to the face of the rock, or screamed from the depth of
the vaults. Such an indignation meeting I never attended before; but,
like many others I have heard of, the time for action was passed before
they had decided what to do.

It was now eleven o'clock, and Svaerholt glowed in fiery bronze lustre as
we rounded it, the eddies of returning birds gleaming golden in the
nocturnal sun, like drifts of beech leaves in the October air. Far to
the north, the sun lay in a bed of saffron light over the clear horizon
of the Arctic Ocean. A few bars of dazzling orange cloud floated above
him, and still higher in the sky, where the saffron melted through
delicate rose-colour into blue, hung light wreaths of vapour, touched
with pearly, opaline flushes of pink and golden grey. The sea was a web
of pale slate-colour, shot through and through with threads of orange
and saffron, from the dance of a myriad shifting and twinkling ripples.
The air was filled and permeated with the soft, mysterious glow, and
even the very azure of the southern sky seemed to shine through a net of
golden gauze. The headlands of this deeply-indented coast--the capes of
the Laxe and Porsanger Fjords, and of Mageroe--lay around us, in
different degrees of distance, but all with foreheads touched with
supernatural glory. Far to the north-east was Nordkyn, the most northern
point of the mainland of Europe, gleaming rosily and faint in the full
beams of the sun, and just as our watches denoted midnight the North
Cape appeared to the westward--a long line of purple bluff, presenting
a vertical front of nine hundred feet in height to the Polar Sea. Midway
between those two magnificent headlands stood the Midnight Sun, shining
on us with subdued fires, and with the gorgeous colouring of an hour for
which we have no name, since it is neither sunset nor sunrise, but the
blended loveliness of both--but shining at the same moment, in the heat
and splendour of no