Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to feel oddly distant and dream-like.
On my sixteenth day in Hammerfest, it happened. I was returning from the headland after my morning
walk and in an empty piece of sky above the town there appeared a translucent cloud of many colours -
pinks and greens and blues and pale purples. It glimmered and seemed to swirl. Slowly it stretched across
the sky. It had an oddly oily quality about it, like the rainbows you sometimes see in a pool of petrol. I stood
transfixed.
I knew from my reading that the Northern Lights are immensely high up in the atmosphere, something
like 200 miles up, but this show seemed to be suspended just above the town. There are two kinds of
Northern Light - the curtains of shimmering gossamer that everyone has seen in pictures, and the rather
rarer gas clouds that I was gazing at now. They are never the same twice. Sometimes they shoot wraith-like
across the sky, like smoke in a wind tunnel, moving at enormous speed, and sometimes they hang like
luminous drapes or glittering spears of light, and very occasionally - perhaps once or twice in a lifetime -
they creep out from every point on the horizon and flow together overhead in a spectacular, silent explosion
of light and colour.
In the depthless blackness of the countryside, where you may be a hundred miles from the nearest
artificial light, they are capable of the most weird and unsettling optical illusions. They can seem to come out
of the sky and fly at you at enormous speeds, as if trying to kill you. Apparently it's terrifying. To this day,
many Lapps earnestly believe that if you show the Lights a white handkerchief or a sheet of white paper they
will come and take you away.
This display was relatively small stuff, and it lasted for only a few minutes, but it was the most beautiful
thing I had ever seen and it would do me until something better came along.
In the evening, something did - a display of Lights that went on for hours. They were of only one colour,
that eerie luminous green you see on radar screens, but the activity was frantic. Narrow swirls of light would
sweep across the great dome of sky, then hang there like vapour trails. Sometimes they flashed across the
sky like falling stars and sometimes they spun languorously, reminding me of the lazy way smoke used to
rise from my father's pipe when he was reading. Sometimes the Lights would flicker brightly in the west,
then vanish in an instant and reappear a moment later behind me, as if teasing me. I was constantly turning
and twisting to see it. You have no idea how immense the sky is until you try to monitor it all. The eerie thing
was how silent it was. Such activity seemed to demand at the very least an occasional low boom or a series
of static-like crackles, but there was none. All this immense energy was spent without a sound.
I was very cold - inside my boots I wore three pairs of socks but still my toes were numb and I began to
worry about frostbite - but I stayed and watched for perhaps two hours, unable to pull myself away.
The next day I went to the tourist office to report my good news to Hans, the tourism director who had
become something of a friend, and to reserve a seat on the following week's bus. There was no longer any
need to hang around. Hans looked surprised and said, 'Didn't you know? There's no bus next week. It's
going to Alta for its annual maintenance.'
I was crushed. Two more weeks in Hammerfest. What was I going to do with myself for two more
weeks?
'But you're in luck,' Hans added. 'You can go today.'
I couldn't take this in. 'What?'
'The bus should have arrived yesterday but it didn't get through because of heavy snows around
Kautokeino. It arrived this morning. Didn't you see it out there? They're going back again today.'
'Today? Really? When?'
He looked at his watch with the casualness of someone who has lived for years in the middle of
nowhere and will be living there for years more yet. 'Oh, in about ten minutes, I should think.'
Ten minutes! I have seldom moved so quickly. I ran to the bus, begged them not to leave without me,
though without any confidence that this plea was understood, ran to the hotel, threw everything into my
suitcase, paid the bill, made my thanks and arrived at the bus, trailing oddments of clothes behind me, just
as it was about to pull out.
The funny thing is that as we were leaving Hammerfest, just for an instant I had a sudden urge not to go.
It was a nice town. I liked the people. They had been kind to me. In other circumstances, I might just have
