Near the Top of the World: Stories of Norway, Sweden & Denmark — John Shaqi
Near the Top of the World: Stories of Norway, Sweden & DenmarkMoore, Nelle E.
General
Near the Top of the World: Stories of Norway, Sweden & Denmark
Moore, Nelle E.
Readers -- Geography; Scandinavia -- Juvenile literature
For many weeks the children had sunshine while they worked and while
they played. No longer did they have to work in their schoolrooms by
electric light. They ate their breakfasts, dinners, and suppers while
the sun shone. They even had sunshine while they slept, sunshine all
through the night. The sun did not set again until late in July. And in
July the sun was gone from the sky only a few hours each night.
[Illustration: THIS PICTURE SHOWS HOW THE SUN SEEMS TO MOVE AROUND THE
HORIZON
An exposure was made every 20 minutes without
changing the position of the camera.]
Day after day the sun was gone for a little longer time until one day in
November it set again not to return until the next January.
Hammerfest, the town in which those children live, is in Norway. It is
farther north than any other town in the world. It is a small town with
only about six hundred homes.
The homes in Hammerfest are built of wood. Many of them are not painted
and the wood has turned dark brown from the weather. Other homes are
painted white, light green, pink, and blue. These colored houses are
pretty with their roofs of red tile.
The streets are narrow and look very bare without trees, and few trees
can grow in the cold of the far north. Hammerfest has a park with a
half-dozen or more trees and just outside the town stands a lone
tree—the most northern tree in the world. The school children are proud
of those few trees even though they are no larger than shrubs. They
point them out to the visitors who come to their town.
[Illustration: THIS TREE IS FARTHER NORTH THAN ANY OTHER TREE IN THE
WORLD]
Hammerfest faces the sea. The girls and boys of Hammerfest hurry to meet
the ships that stop on their shores. They look to see what flag each
ship flies. When they see the flag of a ship they are sure to know from
what country it comes. They see ships with Swedish flags, ships with
Danish flags, ships with Dutch flags, ships with English flags, ships
with American flags, and many other ships with other flags. The boys
like to watch ships unload coal, machinery, grain, and foodstuffs; and
to watch other ships being loaded with fish, cod-liver oil, and hides.
[Illustration: THE NORTH CAPE AND THE MIDNIGHT SUN]
Both the boys and the girls like to go aboard the passenger ships that
visit their port. Sometimes they try to talk to the passengers. They
hear many strange languages—English, Dutch, French, German, and
Italian. They see people from many different countries—England,
Scotland, America, Holland, France, Germany, and Italy. People from
almost all over the world stop at Hammerfest on the large steamers which
carry them to the very top of Norway to a big rock that sticks out into
the Arctic Ocean. That rock called the North Cape is less than one
hundred miles from Hammerfest. Many, many people visit the North Cape
each summer at the time when the sun shines there at midnight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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