LAPLAND, AND LAND OF THE SAMOIDES. 71 



piece they warn off settlers in their midst. The women, 

 looking anything but lovely in their sealskin tights and 

 reindeer smocks, are infamous for magic and second sight. 

 In every district of the north a female Lapp is feared as a 

 witch an enchantress, who keeps a devil at her side, bound 

 by the powers of darkness to obey her will. She can see 

 into the coming day. She can bring a man ill luck. She 

 can throw herself out into space, and work upon ships that 

 are sailing past her on the sea. Far out in the polar brine, 

 where her countrymen fish for cod, stands a lump of rock, 

 which the crews regard as a woman and her child. 



' Such phantasies are common in these Arctic seas where 

 the waves wash in and out through the cliffs, and rend and 

 carve them into wondrous shapes. A rock on the .North 

 Cape is the Friar ; a group of islets near that cape is 

 known as the Mother and her Daughters. Seen through 

 the veil of Polar mist, a block of stone may take a 

 mysterious form ; and that lump of rock in the Polar 

 waste, which the cod fishers say is like a woman with her 

 child, has long been known to them as the Golden Hag. 

 She is rarely seen ; for the clouds in summer, and the 

 snows in winter, hide her charms from the fisherman's 

 eyes ; but when she deigns to show her face in the clear 

 bright sun, her children hail her with a song of joy, for on 

 seeing her face they know that their voyage will be blessed 

 by a plentiful harvest of skins and fish. 



' Woe to the mariner tossed upon their coast ! 



' The land on our left is the Kanin Peninsula ; part of 

 that region of heath and sand over which the Samoyed 

 roams ; a desert of ice and snow still wilder than the 

 countries hunted by the Lapp. A land without a village, 

 without a road, without a field, without a name ; for the 

 Russians who own it have no name for it save that of the 

 Samoyed's land. This province of the great empire 

 wends away north and east from the walls of Archangel, 

 and the waters of the Kanin Cape to the summits of the 

 Ural chain, and the iron gates of the Kara Sea. In her 

 clefts and ridges snow never melts j and her shore- 



