88 NOTES ON A SUMMER TOUR IN NORWAY. 
Such a scheme is by no means so Utopian as at first sight it may 
appear to you; but the day has not yet quite arrived for floating 
the Scandinavian United Waterfalls Company, Limited. 
From Hammerfest to the North Cape is but a few hours’ sail, 
and the scenery becomes extremely desolate and Arctic in 
character. We are now above the northern limits of trees, the 
few stunted birch trees a little south of Hammerfest being their 
last representatives. Vegetation of every kind is extremely 
scanty, ‘‘and the silence and solemnity of the scene is only 
broken by immense flocks of sea-fowl wheeling over shoals of fish 
or congregating around their island homes,” and by the 
occasional noisy spouting of a whale. 
We pass the Bird Rock, with its myriads of auks and gulls, 
which at the sound of a cannon shot rise in one dense cloud high 
in the air. 
As our course is now very much to the east of north, we are 
reminded of the high latitudes we are in by the rapid and 
bewildering change in the ship’s time. This, of course, is due to 
a comparatively short course resulting in a rapid change of 
longitude, the parallels of longitude lying so very close together 
as we approach the Pole. 
The North Cape, the most northerly point of the Continent of 
Europe, is in latitude 71° 10’’ N., and is a bold and forbidding 
headland rising precipitously out of the sea. 
“ And then uprose before me 
Upon the water’s edge 
The huge and haggard shape 
Of that unknown North Cape, 
Whose form is like a wedge.” 
Longfellow. 
So sang, according to Longfellow, Othere, the discoverer of the 
North Cape, to the incredulous King Alfred. 
The arrival at this, the most northerly point of our journey, 
was timed so that we should have an opportunity of seeing the 
midnight sun from the Cape. Unfortunately, a rough sea did 
not permit us to land and ascend the cliff, but the clouds which 
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