On the eastern sh.o.r.e of the lake is a chain of mountains, from two to four thousand feet high; to the south, west, and north rise the green hills on which the farms lie; above these, again, rise other hills, higher and more distant, where in the edges of the snow tracts or buried in fir forests are the saeters, the farmers" summer homes.
As we drove into the village we met the peasants going home from church: the women in short green or black gowns, with gay jackets and white handkerchiefs made into a flying-b.u.t.tress sort of head-dress on their heads; the men with knee-breeches, short vests, and jackets thick trimmed with silver b.u.t.tons. Every man bowed and every woman courtesied as we pa.s.sed. To pa.s.s any human being on the highway without a sign or token of greeting would be considered in Norway the height of ill manners; any child seen to do it would be sharply reproved. Probably few things would astonish the rural Norwegian more than to be told that among the highly civilized it is considered a mark of good breeding, if you chance to meet a fellow-man on the highway, to go by him with no more recognition of his presence than you would give to a tree or a stone wall.
It is an odd thing that a man should be keeping the Vossevangen Hotel to-day who served in America"s civil war, was for two years in one of the New York regiments, and saw a good deal of active service. He was called back to Norway by the death of his father, which made it necessary for him to take charge of the family estate in Vossevangen.
He has married a Vossevangen woman, and is likely to end his days there; but he hankers for Chicago, and always will. He keeps a fairly good little hotel, on the sh.o.r.es of the lake, with a row of willow-trees in front; dwarf apple-trees, gooseberry and currant bushes, and thickets of rhubarb in his front yard; roses, too, besides larkspur and phlox; but the rhubarb has the place of honor. The dining-room and the parlor were, like those at Eide, adorned with ivies and flowering plants; oleanders in the windows and potted carnations on the table. In one corner of the dining-room was a large round table covered with old silver for sale: tankards, chains, belts, b.u.t.tons, coins, rings, buckles, brooches, ornaments of all kinds,--hundreds of dollars" worth of things. There they lay, day and night, open to all who came; and they had done this, the landlady said, for years, and not a single article had ever been stolen: from which it is plain that not only is the Norwegian honest himself, there must be a contagion in his honesty, which spreads it to all travellers in his country.
The next morning, early, we set off in a peasant"s cart to visit some of the farm-houses.
"Now you shall see," said Sanna, "that it was not possible if you had all day to ride in this kind of wagon."
It did not take long to prove the truth of her remark. A shallow wooden box set on two heavy wheels; a wooden seat raised on two slanting wooden braces, so high that one"s feet but just reach the front edge of the box; no dasher, no sides to seat, no anything, apparently, after you are up, except your hard wooden seat and two pounding wheels below,--this is the peasant wagon. The horse, low down between two heavy thills, is without traces, pulls by a breast collar, is guided by rope reins, and keeps his heels half the time under the front edge of the box. The driver stands up in the box behind you, and the rope reins are in your hair, or on your neck, shoulders, ears, as may be. The walloping motion of this kind of box, drawn by a frisky Norwegian horse over rough roads, is droll beyond description. But when it comes to going down hills in it, and down hills so steep that the box appears to be on the point of dumping you between the horse"s ears at each wallop, it ceases to be droll, and becomes horrible. Our driver was a splendid specimen of a man,--six feet tall, strong built, and ruddy. When he found that I was an American, he glowed all over, and began to talk rapidly to Sanna. He had six brothers in America.
"They do say that they all have it very good there," interpreted Sanna; "and he thinks to go there himself so soon as there is money to take all. It must be that America is the best country in the world, to have it so good there that every man can have it good."
The roads up the hills were little more than paths. Often for many rods there was no trace of wheels on the stony ledges; again the track disappeared in a bit of soft meadow. As we climbed, the valley below us rounded and hollowed, and the lake grew smaller and smaller to the eye; the surrounding hills opened up, showing countless valleys winding here and there among them. It was a surpa.s.singly beautiful view. Vast tracts of firs, inky black in the distances, emphasized the glittering of the snow fields above them and the sunny green of the nearer foregrounds below.
The first farm which we visited lay about three miles north of the village,--three miles north and up. The buildings were huddled together, some half dozen of them, in a haphazard sort of way, with no attempt at order, no front, no back, and no particular reason for approaching one way rather than another. Walls of hewn logs, black with age; roofs either thatched, or covered with huge slabs of slate, laid on irregularly and moss-grown; rough stones or logs for doorsteps; so little difference between the buildings that one was at a loss to know which were meant for dwellings and which for barns,--a more unsightly spot could hardly be imagined. But the owners had as quick an instinct of hospitality as if they dwelt in a palace. No sooner did Sanna mention that I was from America, and wished to see some of the Norwegian farm-houses, than their faces brightened with welcome and good-will, and they were ready to throw open every room and show me all their simple stores.
"There is not a man in all Vos," they said, "who has not a relative in America." And they asked eager question after question, in insatiable curiosity, about the unknown country whither their friends had gone.
The wives and daughters of the family were all away, up at the saeter with the cows; only the men and the servant maids were left at home to make the hay. Would I not go up to the saeter? The mistress would be distressed that an American lady had visited the farm in her absence. I could easily go to the saeter in a day. It was only five hours on horseback, and about a half-hour"s walk, at the last, over a path too rough even for riding. Very warmly the men urged Sanna to induce me to make the trip. They themselves would leave the haying and go with me, if I would only go; and I must never think I had seen Norwegian farming unless I had seen the saeter also, they said.
The maids were at dinner in the kitchen. It was a large room, with walls not more than eight feet high, black with smoke; and in the centre a square stone trough, above which was built a funnel chimney.
In this hollow trough a fire smouldered, and above it hung an enormous black caldron, full of beer, which was being brewed. One of the maids sprang from her dinner, lifted a trap door in the floor, disappeared in the cellar, and presently returned, bringing a curious wooden drinking-vessel shaped like a great bowl, with a prow at each side for handles, and painted in gay colors. This was br.i.m.m.i.n.g full of new beer, just brewed. Sanna whispered to me that it would be bad manners if we did not drink freely of it. It was pa.s.sed in turn to each member of the party. The driver, eying me sharply as I forced down a few mouthfuls of the nauseous drink, said something to Sanna.
"He asks if American ladies do not like beer," said Sanna. "He is mortified that you do not drink. It will be best that we drink all we can. It is all what they have. Only I do hope that they give us not brandy."
There was no window in the kitchen, no ventilation except through the chimney and the door. A bare wooden table, wooden chairs, a few shelves, where were ranged some iron utensils, were all the furniture of the gloomy room. The maids" dinner consisted of a huge plate of fladbrod and jugs of milk; nothing else. They would live on that, Sanna said, for weeks, and work in the hay-fields from sunrise till midnight.
Opposite the kitchen was the living-room,--the same smoky log walls, bare floors, wooden chairs and benches. The expression of poverty was dismal.
"I thought you said these people were well to do!" I exclaimed.
"So they are," replied Sanna. "They are very well off; they do not know that it is not comfort to be like this. They shall have money in banks, these people. All the farmers in Vos are rich."
Above the living-room were two bedrooms and clothes-rooms. Here, in gay painted scarlet boxes and hanging from lines, were the clothes of the family and the bed linen of the house. Mistress and maid alike must keep their clothes in this common room. The trunks were ranged around the sides of the room, each locked with a key big enough to lock prison doors. On one side of one of the rooms were three bunk beds built in under the eaves. These were filled with loose straw, and had only blankets for covers. Into this straw the Norwegian burrows by night, rolled in his blankets. The beds can never be moved, for they are built in with the framework of the house. No wonder that the Norwegian flea has, by generations of such good lodging and food, become a triumphant Bedouin marauder, in comparison with whom the fleas of all other countries are too petty to deserve mention.
The good-natured farmer opened his mother"s box as well as his wife"s, and with awkward and unaccustomed hands shook out their Sunday costumes for us to see. From another box, filled with soft blankets and linen, he took out a bottle of brandy, and pouring some into a little silver bowl, with the same prow-shaped handles as the wooden one we had seen in the kitchen, pressed us to drink. One drop of it was like liquid fire. He seemed hurt that we refused more, and poured it down his own throat at a gulp, without change of a muscle. Then he hid the brandy bottle again under the blankets, and the little silver cup in the till of his mother"s chest, and locked them both up with the huge keys.
Downstairs we found an aged couple, who had come from another of the buildings, hearing of our presence. These were the grandparents. The old woman was eighty-four, and was knitting briskly without gla.s.ses.
She took us into the storerooms, where were bins of flour and grain; hams of beef and pork hanging up; wooden utensils of all sorts, curiously carved and stained wooden spoons, among other things,--a cask full of them, put away to be used "when they had a merry-making."
Here also were stacks of fladbrod. This is the staple of the Norwegian"s living; it is a coa.r.s.e bread made of dark flour, in cakes as thin as a wafer and as big round as a barrel. This is baked once a year, in the spring, is piled up in stacks in the storerooms, and keeps good till the spring baking comes round again. It is very sweet and nutritious: one might easily fare worse than to have to make a meal of it with milk. On one of the storeroom shelves I spied an old wooden drinking-bowl, set away with dried peas in it. It had been broken, and riveted together in the bottom, but would no longer hold water, so had been degraded to this use. It had once been gayly painted, and had a motto in old Norwegian around the edge: "Drink in good-will, and give thanks to G.o.d." I coveted the thing, and offered to buy it. It was a study to see the old people consult with each other if they should let it go. It seemed that when they first went to housekeeping it had been given to them by the woman"s mother, and was an old bowl even then. It was certainly over a hundred years old, and how much more there was no knowing. After long discussion they decided to sell it to me for four kroner (about one dollar), which the son thought (Sanna said) was a shameful price to ask for an old broken bowl. But he stood by in filial submission, and made no loud objection to the barter. The old woman also showed us a fine blanket, which had been spun and woven by her mother a hundred years ago. It was as gay of color and fantastic of design as if it had been made in Algiers.
This too she was willing to sell for an absurdly small price, but it was too heavy to bring away. At weddings and other festivities these gay blankets are hung on the walls; and it is the custom for neighbors to lend all they can on such occasions.
The next farm we visited belonged to the richest people in Vos. It lay a half-mile still higher up, and the road leading to it seemed perilously steep. The higher we went, the greater the profusion of flowers: the stony way led us through tracts of bloom, in blue and gold; tall spikes of mullein in clumps like hollyhocks, and "shepherd"s bells" in great purple patches.
The buildings of this farm were cl.u.s.tered around a sort of court-yard enclosure, roughly flagged by slate. Most of the roofs were also slated; one or two were thatched, and these thatched roofs were the only thing that redeemed the gloom of the spot, the sods on these being bright with pansies and gra.s.ses and waving raspberry bushes.
Here also we found the men of the family alone at home, the women being gone on their summering at the saeter. The youngest son showed us freely from room to room, and displayed with some pride the trunks full of blankets and linen, and the rows of women"s dresses hanging in the chambers. On two sides of one large room these were hung thick one above another, no variety in them, and no finery; merely a succession of strong, serviceable petticoats, of black, green, or gray woollen.
The gay jackets and stomachers were packed away in trunks; huge fur-lined coats, made of the same shape for men and for women, hung in the storeroom. Some of the trunks were red, painted in gay colors; some were of polished cedar, finished with fine bra.s.s mountings. As soon as a Norwegian girl approaches womanhood, one of these trunks is given her, set in its place in the clothes-room, and her acc.u.mulations begin. Clothes, bedding, and silver ornaments seem to be the only things for which the Norwegian peasant spends his money. In neither of these houses was there an article of superfluous furniture, not even of ordinary comfort. In both were the same bunk beds, built in under the eaves; the same loose, tossed straw, with blankets for covering; and only the coa.r.s.est wooden chairs and benches for seats. The young man opened his mother"s trunk, and took from one corner a beautiful little silver beaker, with curling, prow-shaped handles. In this the old lady had packed away her silver brooches, b.u.t.tons, and studs for the summer. Side by side with them, thrown in loosely among her white head-dresses and blouses, were half a dozen small twisted rolls of white bread. Sanna explained this by saying that the Norwegians never have this bread except at their most important festivals; it is considered a great luxury, and these had no doubt been put away as a future treat, as we should put away a bit of wedding-cake to keep.
Very irreverently the son tipped out all his mother"s ornaments into the bottom of the trunk, and proceeded to fill the little beaker with fiery brandy from a bottle which had been hid in another corner. From lip to lip it was pa.s.sed, returning to him wellnigh untasted; but he poured the whole down at a draught, smacked his lips, and tossed the cup back into the trunk, dripping with the brandy. Very much that good old Norwegian dame, when she comes down in the autumn, will wonder, I fancy, what has happened to her nicely packed trunk of underclothes, dry bread, and old silver.
There were several storerooms in these farm buildings, and they were well filled with food, grain, flour, dried meats, fish, and towers of fladbrod. Looms with partly finished webs of cloth in them were there set away till winter; baskets full of carved yellow spoons hung on the wall. In one of the rooms, standing on the sill of the open window, were two common black gla.s.s bottles, with a few pond-lilies in each,--the only bit of decoration or token of love of the beautiful we had found. Seeing that I looked at the lilies with admiration, the young man took them out, wiped their dripping stems on his coat-sleeve, and presented them to me with a bow that a courtier might have envied. The grace, the courtesy, of the Norwegian peasant"s bow is something that must date centuries back. Surely there is nothing in his life and surroundings to-day to create or explain it. It must be a trace of something that Olaf Tryggveson--that "magnificent, far-shining man"--scattered abroad in his kingdom eight hundred years ago, with his "bright, airy, wise way" of speaking and behaving to women and men.
One of the buildings on this farm was known, the young man said, to be at least two hundred years old. The logs are moss-grown and black, but it is good for hundreds of years yet. The first story is used now for a storeroom. From this a ladder led up to a half-chamber overhead, the front railed by a low railing; here, in this strange sort of balcony bedroom, had slept the children of the family, all the time under observation of their elders below.
Thrust in among the rafters, dark, rusty, bent, was an ancient sword.
Our guide took it out and handed it to us, with a look of awe on his face. No one knew, he said, how long that sword had been on the farm.
In the earliest writings by which the estate had been transferred, that sword had been mentioned, and it was a clause in every lease since that it should never be taken away from the place. However many times the farm might change hands, the sword must go with it, for all time. Was there no legend, no tradition, with it? None that his father or his father"s father had ever heard; only the mysterious entailed charge, from generation to generation, that the sword must never be removed. The blade was thin and the edge jagged, the handle plain and without ornament; evidently the sword had been for work, and not for show. There was something infinitely solemn in its inalienable estate of safe and reverent keeping at the hands of men all ignorant of its history. It is by no means impossible that it had journeyed in the company of that Sigurd who sailed with his splendid fleet of sixty ships for Palestine, early in the twelfth century. Sigurd Jorsalafarer, or Traveller to Jerusalem, he was called; and no less an authority than Thomas Carlyle vouches for him as having been "a wise, able, and prudent man," reigning in a "solid and successful way."
Through the Straits of Gibraltar to Jerusalem, home by way of Constantinople and Russia, "shining with renown," he sailed, and took a hand in any fighting he found going on by the way. Many of his men came from the region of the Sogne Fjord; and the more I thought of it the surer I felt that this old sword had many a time flashed on the deck of his ships.
Our second day opened rainy. The lake was blotted out by mist; on the fence under the willows sat half a dozen men, roosting as unconcernedly as if it were warm sunshine.
"It does wonder me," said Sanna, "that I find here so many men standing idle. When the railroad come, it shall be that the life must be different."
A heroic English party, undeterred by weather, were setting off in carioles and on horseback. Delays after delays occurred to hinder them. At the last moment their angry courier was obliged to go and fetch the washing, which had not arrived. There is a proverb in Norway, "When the Norwegian says "immediately," look for him in half an hour."
Finally, at noon, in despair of sunshine, we also set off: rugs, water-proofs; the india-rubber boot of the carriage drawn tight up to the level of our eyes; we set off in pouring sheets of rain for Gudvangen. For the first two hours the sole variation of the monotony of our journey was in emptying the boot of water once every five minutes, just in time to save a freshet in our laps. High mountain peaks, black with forests or icy white with snow, gleamed in and out of the clouds on either hand, as we toiled and splashed along.
Occasional lightings up revealed stretches of barren country, here and there a cl.u.s.ter of farm-houses or a lowly church. On the sh.o.r.es of a small lake we pa.s.sed one of these lonely churches. Only two other buildings were in sight in the vast expanse: one, the wretched little inn where we were to rest our horses for half an hour; the other, the parsonage. This last was a pretty little cottage, picturesquely built of yellow pine, half bowered in vines, looking in that lonely waste as if it had lost itself and strayed away from some civilized spot. The pastor and his sister, who kept house for him, were away; but his servant was so sure that they would like to have us see their home that we allowed her to show it to us. It was a tasteful and cosey little home: parlor, study, and dining-room, all prettily carpeted and furnished; books, flowers, a sewing-machine, and a piano. It did one"s heart good to see such an oasis of a home in the wilderness. Drawn up on rests in a shed near the house, was an open boat, much like a wherry. The pastor spent hours every day, the maid said, in rowing on the lake. It was his great pleasure.
Up, up we climbed: past fir forests, swamps, foaming streams,--the wildest, weirdest road storm-driven people ever crossed. Spite of the rain, half-naked children came flying out of hovels and cabins to open gates: sometimes there would be six in a row, their thin brown hands all stretched for alms, and their hollow eyes begging piteously; then they would race on ahead to open the next gate. The moors seemed but a succession of enclosed pasture-lands. Now and then we pa.s.sed a little knot of cabins close to the road, and men who looked kindly, but as wild as wild beasts, would come out and speak to the driver; their poverty was direful to see. At last, at the top of a high hill, we halted; the storm stayed; the clouds lifted and blew off. At our feet lay a black chasm; it was like looking down into the bowels of the earth. This was the Nerodal Valley; into it we were to descend. Its walls were three and four thousand feet high. It looked little more than a cleft. The road down this precipitous wall is a marvel of engineering. It is called the Stalheimscleft, and was built by a Norwegian officer, Captain Finne. It is made in a series of zigzagging loops, which are so long and so narrow that the descent at no point appears steep; yet as one looks up from any loop to the loop next above, it seems directly over his head. Down this precipice into the Nerodal Valley leap two grand fosses, the Stalheimfos and the Salvklevfos; roaring in ceaseless thunder, filling the air, and drenching the valley with spray. Tiny gra.s.s-grown s.p.a.ces between the bowlders and the loops of the road had all been close mowed; s.p.a.ces which looked too small for the smallest reaping-hook to swing in were yet close shorn, and the little handfuls of hay hung up drying on hand"s-breadths of fence set up for the purpose. Even single blades of gra.s.s are too precious in Norway to be wasted.
As we walked slowly down this incredible road, we paused step by step to look first up, then down. The carriage waiting for us below on the bridge looked like a baby wagon. The river made by the meeting of these two great cataracts at the base of the precipice was only a little silver thread flowing down the valley. The cataracts seemed leaping from the sky, and the sky seemed resting on the hill-tops; ma.s.ses of whirling and floating clouds added to the awesome grandeur of the scene. The Stalheimfos fell into a deep, basin-shaped ravine, piled with great bowlders, and full of birch and ash shrubs; in the centre of this, by some strange play of the water, rose a distinct and beautifully shaped cone, thrown up closely in front of the fall, almost blending with it, and thick veiled in the tumultuous spray,--a fountain in a waterfall. It seemed the accident of a moment, but its shape did not alter so long as we watched it; it is a part of the fall.
Five miles down this cleft, called valley, to Gudvangen run the road and the little river and the narrow strips of meadow, dark, thin, and ghastly; long months in utter darkness this Nerodal lies, and never, even at summer"s best and longest, has it more than a half-day of sun.
The mountains rise in sheer black walls on either hand,--bare rock in colossal shafts and peaks, three, four, and even five thousand feet high; snow in the rifts at top; patches of gaunt firs here and there; great s.p.a.ces of tumbled rocks, where avalanches have slid; pebbly and sandy channels worn from side to side of the valley, where torrents have rushed down and torn a way across; white streams from top to bottom of the precipices, all foam and quiver, like threads spun out on the sward, more than can be counted; they seem to swing down out of the sky as spider threads swing swift and countless in a dewy morning.
Sanna shuddered. "Now you see, one could not spend a whole day in Nerodal Valley," she said. "It does wonder me that any people will live here. Every spring the mountains do fall and people are killed."
On a narrow rim of land at base of these walls, just where the fjord meets the river, is the village of Gudvangen, a desolate huddle of half a dozen poor houses. A chill as of death filled the air; foul odors arose at every turn. The two little inns were overcrowded with people, who roamed restlessly up and down, waiting for they knew not what. An indescribable gloom settles on Gudvangen with nightfall. The black waters of the fjord chafing monotonously at the base of the black mountains; the sky black also, and looking farther off than sky ever looked before, walled into a strip, like the valley beneath it; hemmed in, forsaken, doomed, and left seems Gudvangen. What hold life can have on a human being kept in such a spot it is hard to imagine.
Yet we found three very old women hobn.o.bbing contentedly there in a cave of a hut. Ragged, dirty, hideous, hopeless one would have thought them; but they were all agog and cheery, and full of plans for repairing their house. They were in a little log stable, perhaps ten feet square, and hardly high enough to stand upright in: they were cowering round a bit of fire in the centre; their piles of straw and blankets laid in corners; not a chair, not a table. Macbeth"s witches had seemed full-dressed society women by the side of these. We peered timidly in at the group, and they all came running towards us, chattering, glad to see strangers, and apologizing for their condition, because, as they said, they had just turned in there together for a few days, while their house across the way was being mended. Not a light of any description had they, except the fire. The oldest one hobbled away, and returned with a small tallow candle, which she lit and held in her hand, to show us how comfortable they were, after all; plenty of room for three piles of straw on the rough log floor. Their "house across the way" was a little better than this; not much. One of the poor old crones had "five children in America."
"They wanted her to come out to America and live with them, but she was too old to go away from home," she said. "Home was the best place for old people," to which the other two a.s.sented eagerly. "Oh, yes, home was the best place. America was too far."
It seemed a miracle to have comfort in an inn in so poverty-stricken a spot as this, but we did. We slept in straw-filled bunks, set tight into closets under the eaves; only a narrow doorway by which to get in and out of bed; but there were two windows in the room, and no need to stifle. And for supper there was set before us a stew of lamb, delicately flavored with curry, and served with rice, of which no house need be ashamed. That so palatable a dish could have issued from the place which answered for kitchen in that poor little inn was a marvel; it was little more than a small dark tomb. The dishes were all washed out-of-doors in tubs set on planks laid across two broken chairs at the kitchen door; and the food and milk were kept in an above-ground cellar not three steps from the same door. This had been made by an immense slab of rock which had crashed down from the mountain top, one day, and instead of tearing through the house and killing everybody had considerately lodged on top of two other bowlders, roofing the s.p.a.ce in, and forming a huge stone refrigerator ready to hand for the innkeeper. The enclosed s.p.a.ce was cold as ice, and high enough and large enough for one to walk about in it comfortably. I had the curiosity to ask this innkeeper how much he could make in a year off his inn. When he found that I had no sinister motive in the inquiry, he was freely communicative. At first he feared, Sanna said, that it might become known in the town how much money he was making, and that demands might be made on him in consequence. If the season of summer travel were very good, he said he would clear two hundred dollars; but he did not always make so much as that. He earned a little also by keeping a small shop, and in the winter that was his only resource. He had a wife and two children, and his wife was not strong, which made it harder for them, as they were obliged always to keep a servant.
Even in full sunlight, at nine of the morning, Gudvangen looked grim and dangerous, and the Nero Fjord water black. As we sailed out, the walls of the valley closed up suddenly behind us, as with a snap which might have craunched poor little Gudvangen to death. The fjord is as wild as the pa.s.s; in fact, the same thing, only that it has water at bottom instead of land, and you can sail closer than you can drive at base of the rocky walls. Soon we came to the mouth of another great fjord, opening up another watery road into the mountains; this was the Aurland, and on its farther sh.o.r.e opened again the Sognedal Fjord, up which we went a little way to leave somebody at a landing. Here were green hills and slopes and trees, and a bright yellow church, shaped like a blancmange mould in three pyramid-shaped cones, each smaller than the one below.
"Here is the finest fruit orchard in all Scandinavia," said Sanna, pointing to a pretty place just out of the town, where fields rose one above the other in terraces on south-facing slopes, covered thick with orchards. "It belongs to an acquainted with me: but she must sell it.
She is a widow, and she cannot take the care to herself."
Back again across the mouth of the Aurland Fjord, and then out into the great Sogne Fjord, zigzagging from side to side of it, and up into numerous little fjords where the boat looked to be steering straight into hills,--we seemed to be adrift, without purpose, rather than on a definite voyage with a fixed aim of getting home. The magnificent labyrinths of walled waters were calm as the heavens they reflected; the clouds above and clouds below kept silent pace with each other, and we seemed gliding between two skies. Great snow fjelds came in sight, wheeled, rose, sank, and disappeared, as we pa.s.sed; sometimes green meadows stretched on either side of us, then terrible gorges and pinnacles of towering rock. Picture after picture we saw, of gay-colored little villages, with rims of fields and rocky promontories; snow fjelds above, and fir forests between; glittering waterfalls shooting from the sky line to the water, like white lightning down a black stone front, or leaping out in s.p.a.ces of feathery snow, like one preternatural blooming of the forests all the way down the black walls rising perpendicularly thousands of feet; tiers of blue mountains in the distance, dark blue on the nearest, and shading off to palest blue at the sky line; the fjord dark purple in the narrows, shading to gray in the opens; illuminated s.p.a.ces of green, now at the sh.o.r.e, now half-way up, now two-thirds-way up to the sky; tops of hills in sunlight; bars of sunlight streaming through dark clefts. Then a storm-sweep across the fjord, far in our wake,--swooping and sweeping, and gone in a half-hour; blotting out the mountains; then turning them into a dark-slate wall, on which white sails and cross-sunbeams made a superb shining. And so, between the sun and the storm, we came to Valestrand, and sent off and took on boat-loads of pleasuring people,--the boats with bright flags at prow and stern, and gay-dressed women with fantastic parasols like b.u.t.terflies poised on their edges,--Valestrand, where, as some say, Frithiof was born; and as all say, he burnt one of Balder"s great temples. Then Ladvik, on a green slope turning to gold in the sun; its white church with a gray stone spire relieved against a bank of purple gloom; the lights sinking lower and the shadows stretching farther every minute; shadows of hills behind which the sun had already gone, thrown sharp and black on hills still glowing in full light; hills before us, shimmering in soft silver gray and pale purple against a clear golden west; hills behind us, folding and folded in ma.s.ses of rosy vapor; shining fosses leaping down among them; the colors changing like the colors of a prism minute by minute along the tops of the ranges,--this was the way our day on the Sogne Fjord drew near its ending. Industriously knitting, with eyes firm fastened on her needles, sat an English matron near us on the deck. Not one glance of her eye did she give to the splendors of sky and water and land about her.
"I do think that lady must be in want of stockings very much,"
remarked Sanna quietly; "but she need not to come to Norway to knit."
Far worse, however, than the woman who knitted were the women and the men who talked, loudly, stupidly, vulgarly, around us. It was mortifying that their talk was English, but they were not Americans.
At last they drove us to another part of the deck, but not before a few phrases of their conversation had been indelibly stamped on my memory.
"Well, we were in Dresden two days: there"s only the gallery there; that"s time enough for that."