The house looked out over a bay studded with islands; farther out
were more islands and the open sea. An immensely long building,
raised on an old and massive foundation, its eastern wing barely
half furnished, the western inhabited by Harald Kaas, who lived
his curious life here.
These wings were connected by two covered galleries, one above the
other, with stairs at each end.
Curiously enough, these galleries did not face the sea, that is,
the south, but the fields and woods to the north. The portion of
the house between the two wings was a neutral territory--namely, a
large dining-room with a ballroom above it, neither of which was
used in later years.
Harald Kaas's suite of rooms was distinguished from without by a
mighty elk's head with its enormous antlers, which was set up over
the gallery.
In the gallery itself were heads of bear, wolf, fox and lynx, with
stuffed birds from land and sea. Skins and guns hung on the walls
of the anteroom, the inner rooms were also full of skins and
impregnated with the smell of wild animals and tobacco-smoke.
Harald himself called it "Man-smell;" no one who had once put his
nose inside could ever forget it.
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