It will never do for us to sit quiet here until Knutson returns," said
Nils when at Midsummer nothing had been seen of the ships. "We shall be
at one another's throats or quarreling with the savages." He had been
inquiring about the nature of the country, and had learned that westward
a great river led to five inland seas, so connected that canoes could go
from one to another. Along this chain of waters lived tribes who spoke
somewhat the same language and traded with one another. Southward lived
a warlike people who sometimes attacked the lake tribes. Beyond the last
of the lakes they did not know what the country was like. The waters
inland were not troubled with the water-demon so far as they knew. Nils,
Anders and Thorolf held a council and decided to explore the wilderness
as far as they could go in the _Rotge_. It was nothing more than all
their ancestors had done. Often, in their invasions of England, France
and other unknown regions Vikings had gone up one river and come down
another, and the _Rotge_, for all her iron strength, was no more than a
wooden shell when stripped.[6]

They set forth, escorted by a flotilla of small canoes, on a clear
summer morning, and found their progress surprisingly easy. Fish, game
and berries were plentiful, the villages along the river supplied corn
and beans, and though it was not always easy to drag the _Rotge_ around
the carrying-places pointed out by their native guides, they did not
have to turn back. It was a proud moment when the undefeated crew
launched their "water-snake" as the Skroelings called her, on the
shining waters of a great inland sea.

The journey had been a far longer one than they expected, and to natives
of any other country would have been much more exciting than it was to
the Norsemen.[7] They had seen cliffs a thousand feet high, cataracts,
rapids, a multitude of wooded islands, narrow valleys where floating
misty clouds came and went and the sky looked like a riband. But the
precipice above Naero Fiord rises four thousand perpendicular feet, and
the water which laps its base is thousands of feet in depth. The
Skjaeggedalsfos is loftier than Niagara, and the mist-maidens dance
along the perilous pathways of a hundred Norwegian cliffs. Nils and
Thorolf agreed that the Wind-wife was right when she said that the
country of the Skroelings was like Norway but had no end.

"The trouble is," reflected Nils as he set down the day's happenings on
a birch-bark