Amid these inhospitable surroundings they were penned for two weeks,—­Norse weeks of but five days each, but seemingly endless to the captives from the south.  Editha retired permanently into the big bear-skin sleeping-bag that enveloped the whole of her little person and was the only cure for the chattering of her teeth.  Alwin wrapped himself in every garment he owned and as many of Sigurd’s as could be spared, and strove to endure the situation with the stoicism of his companions; but now and then his disgust got the better of his philosophy.

“How intelligent beings can find it in their hearts to return to this country after the good God has once allowed them to leave it, passes my understanding!” he stormed, on the tenth day of this sorry picnicking.  “At first it was in my mind to fear lest such a small ship should sink in such a great sea; now I only dread that it will not, and that we will be brought alive to land and forced to live there.”

Rolf regarded him with his amiable smile.  “If your eyes were as blue as your lips, and your cheeks were as red as your nose, you would be considered a handsome man,” he said encouragingly.

And again it was Sigurd who took pity on Alwin.  “Bear it well; it will not last much longer,” he said.  “Already a passage is opening.  And inside the fiord, much is different from what is expected.”

Alwin smiled with polite incredulity.

The next day’s sun showed a dark channel open to them, so that before noon they had entered upon the broad water-lane known as Eric’s Fiord.  The silence between the towering walls was so absolute, so death-like, as to be almost uncanny.  Mile after mile they sailed, between bleak cliffs ice-crowned and garbed in black lichens; mile after mile further yet, without passing anything more cheerful than a cluster of rocky islands or a slope covered with brownish moss.  The most luxuriant of the islands boasted only a patch of crowberry bushes or a few creeping junipers too much abashed to lift their heads a finger’s length above the earth.

Alwin looked about him with a sigh, and then at Sigurd with a grimace.  “Do you still say that this is pleasanter than drowning?” he inquired.

Sigurd met the fling with obstinate composure.  “Are you blind to the greenness of yonder plain?  And do you not feel the sun upon you?”

All at once it occurred to Alwin that the icy wind of the headlands had ceased to blow; the fog had vanished, and there was a genial warmth in the air about him.  And yonder,—­certainly yonder meadow was as green as the camp in Norway.  He threw off one of his cloaks and settled himself to watch.

Gradually the green patches became more numerous, until the level was covered with nothing else.  In one place, he almost thought he caught a gleam of golden buttercups.  The verdure crept up the snow-clad slopes, hundreds and thousands of feet; and here and there, beside some foaming little cataract tumbling down from a glacier-fed stream, a rhododendron glowed like a rosy flame.  They passed the last island, covered with a copse of willows as high as a tall man’s head, and came into an open stretch of water bordered by rolling pasture lands, filled with daisies and mild-eyed cattle.  Sigurd clutched the English boy’s arm excitedly.