I was quite at Ketil’s mercy in a pecuniary point of view. But he was not one of the Lesere, and was moderate in his demands. After a scramble through his native bog, which would, I think, have put a very moss-trooper on his mettle, we debouched on the end of a lake. Here we took boat, and there being a spanking breeze, we soon shot over the six miles of water. With a stern-wind, fishing was not to be thought of; I never found it answer. At the other end of the lake was a stone cabin, where I took shelter from the blast, while Ketil went in search of his horse.

While I was engaged caulking the seams in my appetite, a fine young fellow in sailor’s costume, who had rowed from the opposite shore, looked in. Talleif, as he was yclept, was from Tjelmodal, with a flock of fourteen thousand sheep and twenty milking goats. He and his comrade, Lars, sleep in an old bear-hole in the Urden (loose rocks). They get nine skillings (threepence) a-head for tending the sheep for ten weeks. Besides this, they pay twelve dollars to Ketil and two other peasants, who are the possessors of these wilds. Their chief food is the milk of the goats. In winter they get their living by fishing.

“Have you any ryper here,” said I to Ketil, as we passed through some very likely-looking birch thickets.

“Yes.”

“What colour?”

“Grey.”

“Are there no brown ones?”

“No; they are grey, and in winter snow-white.”

At this instant I heard the well-known cackle of the cock of the brown species, and a large covey of these birds rose out of the covert.

“Well, they are brown,” said he; “now, I never laid mark to (remarked) that before.”

So much for the observation of these people. Never rely upon them for any information respecting birds, beasts, fishes, or plants. All colours are the same to a blind man, and they are such. I take the man’s word, however, for the fact of there being abundance of otters about and reindeer higher up.

Terribly desolate was that Norwegian Fjeld that now lay before us. But setting our faces resolutely to the ascent, we topped it in two and a half hours, the way now and then threading mossy lanes, so to say, sunk between sloping planes of rock. Screeching out in the unharmonious jargon of Vatnedal, which the SÆtersdal people, proud of their own musical lungs, call “an alarm,” Ketil pointed to a row of stones upon the ridge similar to those I had seen the day before, also called the Bridal stones, and with a similar legend attached to them. What poverty of invention. Why not call them Funeral stones by way of ringing the changes? But no; the people of this country will escort a bride much further than a bier. The honours of sepulture are done with a niggard grace.

As we now began to descend past beds of unmelted snow, I had a good opportunity of seeing the manifest effect of glacial action upon the rocks, the strata of which had been heaved up perpendicularly. Rounded by the ice in one direction, and quartered by their own cleavage in another, the rocks looked for all the world like a vast dish of sweetbreads; just the sort of tid-bit for that colossal Jotul yonder behind us, with the portentously groggy nose, who stands out in sharp relief against the sky. What Gorgon’s head did that? thought I; as the picture in the National Gallery of Phineus and Co. turned to stone at the banquet occurred to my mind. But my reverie was disturbed by a cry from Ketil of the Bog.

“Catch hold of her tail!”

Which exclamation I not apprehending at the moment, the mare slipped down a smooth sweetbread, and nearly came to grief.

Lower down we passed some ice-cold tarns, where I longed to bathe and take some of the limpid element into my thirsting pores, but prudently abstained. After a long descent we came upon a deserted chÂlet, the door of which we unfastened, and plundered it of some sour milk. We shall pay the owner down below. After this refreshment we plunged into a deep gorge, skirting an elv just fresh from its cradle, and which was struggling to get away most lustily for so young an infant.

“Ah! it’s only small now,” said Ketil; “but you should see it in a flom (flood). It’s up in a moment. Two years ago a young fellow crossed there with a horse, and spent the day in cutting grass on the heights. It rained a good deal. He waited too long, and when he tried to get over, horse and man were drowned. They were found below cut to pieces.”

I must take care what I’m about, thought I, as I nearly slipped down the precipice, which was become slippery from a storm of rain which now overtook us.

Below this the scenery becomes more varied, in one place a smiling little amphitheatre of verdure contrasting with the bold mountains which towered to an immense height above.

At length we descend to Suledal lake drenched to the skin. A ready, off-hand sort of fellow, Thorsten Brathweit, at once answers my challenge to row me over the water to Naes. The scenery of the lake is truly superb. The elv, which we had been following, here finds its way to the lake by a mere crack through the rocks of great depth. In one place a big stone that had been hurled from above had become tightly fixed in the cleft, and formed a bridge. Thorsten had plenty to say.

Two reindeer, he told me, were shot last week on the Fjeld I had just crossed. Large salmon get up into the lake. The trout in it run to ten pounds in weight; what I took were only small.

The landlord at Naes, where I spent the night, was astonished that I should have ventured through SÆtersdal.

“They are such a Ro-bygd folk there,” observed he, punningly, i.e., barbarous sort of people.

The race I now encounter are, in fact, of quite a different costume and appearance. The married daughter of the house possessed a good complexioned oval face, with a close-fitting black cloth cap, edged with green, in shape just like those worn by the Dutch vrows, in Netscher’s and Mieris’ pictures. Her light brown hair was cut short behind like a boy’s; such is the fashion among the married women hereabouts.

“Long hair is an ornament to the woman,” observed I to her.

“She didn’t know; that was the custom there.”

The only spoon in the house was a large wooden one, but as by long practice I have arrived at such a pitch of dexterity that I might almost venture on teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, this occasioned me little inconvenience in transferring to my mouth the parboiled mementoes left by a hen now, alas! no more.

There is a mountain-pass across the Fjeld from hence to Roldal, and, as I mounted it next morning by the side of one of the feeders of the lake cascading grandly down, I had a fine view of this noble piece of water. After a stiff walk of three hours and a half we arrive at the summit of the col, and passing the rnan, or cairn, which marks the highest point, looked down upon the pretty Roldal water sunk deep among the mountains, with the snowfields of the Storfond gleaming in the distance.

Here we met a mournful cavalcade. First came a sickly-looking man riding, and another horse following loaded with luggage, while a spruce old dame and a handsome lad walked in the rear. This is a rich bonder from Botne below, who is troubled with a spinal complaint, and after enduring frightful tortures, is on his travels in search of a doctor. Horror of horrors! I felt it running cold down my back as I heard of it. Imagine a man with a diseased spine riding down a Norwegian mountain. Heaven help him! The lad hails me, and asks if I know where a doctor is to be found. I recommend Stavanger, sixty miles off—much of which distance, however, may be travelled by water—in preference to Lillesand, a small place nearer.

It was a great relief, after walking in the intense heat, to boat across Roldal lake, under the shade of the mountains, the air deliciously cooled by the glacier water, which, though milky in colour, did not prevent me catching some trout. The poor fellow, my boatman, has a swollen hand and wrist of some weeks’ standing; I recommend porridge poultice as hot as possible, and a douche of icy water afterwards. Formerly, instead of this simple remedy, it would have been necessary to do “some great thing.” Abana and Pharpar alone would have sufficed. I allude to the miraculous image which used to be kept in the old church at Roldal, now pulled down. On the Eve of St. John it used to sweat, and people came from far and near to apply the exudation to their bodily ailments. Like Dr. Steer’s opodeldoc, it never failed to effect a cure.

As we approach the other end of the lake, a little modern church rises on the shore, while an amphitheatre of cultivated ground, dotted here and there by log-houses, slopes gently upwards towards the grey rocky mountains behind, which afford pasturage for herds of tame reindeer. In the distance may be discerned at intervals a winding path. This path, which at present is only practicable for horses, crosses the summit level of the Hardanger mountains. At Gugaard it becomes a carriage-road, and thence passes on through Vinje to the part of Thelemarken visited by me last year. The Storthing have long been talking of completing the post-road from Gugaard to Busteten, on the SÖr Fjord, a branch of the Hardanger; but hitherto it is confined to talk, although, at present, the only way of getting from the Hardanger district to Kongsberg and the capital, is either to go the long route by the sea round the Naze, or up to LeirdalsÖren, where the high road commences. Formerly Roldal parish was annexed to Suledal, thirty miles off, but it has lately been separated, and has the advantage of a resident clergyman, and service every Sunday.

Sending my effects to the Lehnsman’s, where I purposed stopping the night, I went up the hill to call upon his reverence. He was out, so the girl went to fetch him, taking care to lock the house-door and put the key in her pocket. Presently a vinegar-faced, Yankee-looking young man, with white neckcloth, light coat, and pea-green waistcoat, with enormous flowers embroidered on it, and sucking a cigar the colour of pig-tail, approached. There was a Barmecide look about him, which was not promising, and his line of action tallied exactly with his physiognomy. He stood before the house-door, but made no effort to open it, and there was a repelling uncommunicative way about him, which determined me to retire the moment I had obtained the information I stood in need of.

As I had landed from the boat, a ragged square-built little fellow, with gipsy countenance, had offered to carry my luggage, seventy pounds in weight, over the mountain to Odde, thirty miles distance. Showing me a miserable little hut, he told me he was very poor, and had five children with no bread to eat, while his wife, a tidy-looking woman carrying a bundle of sticks, chimed in with his entreaties, and thanked me warmly for the gift of the few fish I had caught. I was quite willing to hire him, and had come to the priest, to whom he referred me, for some account of his trustworthiness and capabilities.

“Yes,” said his reverence, “he is able to carry that weight; he carried for me more than double as much when I came hither from Odde, and that’s much more uphill (imod).”

“Yes,” said I; “but I travel quick, and I don’t wish to use a man as a beast of burden.”

“He lives by carrying burdens. And what do you want, Knut, for the job?”

“A dollar.”

“That’s too much.”

I did not think so, and the bargain was struck, and I took leave of the vinegar-cruet, who was said to be a chosen vial of pulpit declamation.

What a set of bores or burrs my host the Lehnsman and his family were. They would not let me alone in the loft, which was frightfully hot, and with no openable window. Up tramped first the old man, with half-a-dozen loutish sons, then followed a hobbling old beldam, leaning on a stick, and attended by Brida, a young peasant lass, the only redeeming feature in the group. Fancy arriving at a place dog-tired, and a dozen people surrounding you in the foreground, and asking a hundred questions, with a perspective of white heads bobbing about, and appearing and disappearing through the doorway in the middle distance.

My only chance was my pencil; that is the weapon to repel such intruders. Not that I used it aggressively, as those hopeful students did their styles (see Fox’s Martyrs), digging the sharp points into their Dominie’s body. Taking out my sketch-book, I deliberately singled out one of the phalanx, and commenced transferring his proportions to the paper. This manoeuvre at once routed the assailants, and they retired. Before long, however, the old gent stole in, and prowled stealthily around the fortress before he summoned it to surrender. I parried all his questions, and he departed. His place was then supplied by his eldest son, who was equally unsuccessful, but whom I made useful in boiling some water for tea. The only thing approaching to a tea-pot was a shallow kettle, a foot in diameter. The butter of Roldal is celebrated, and compared to the Herregaard butter of Denmark, but the pile of it brought in by the landlord’s son, on a lordly dish, was stale and nauseous. As nothing was to be got out of me, he, too, disappeared, and I was left in peace and quietness. Another yet! Horrible sight! the old Hecate herself again rises into the loft—not one of “the soft and milky rabble” of womankind, spoken of by the poet, but a charred and wrinkled piece of humanity—all shrivelled and toothless, came and stood over me as I sat at meat.

“Who are you? You shall tell me. Whence do you come from?”

“Christiansand.”

“But are you BaarnefÖd (born) there?”

At the same time she hobbled to a great red box, with various names painted on it, and as a kind of bait, I suppose, produced a quaint silver spoon for my use, which she poised suspiciously in her hand like a female Euclio, as if she was fearful I should swallow it.

But I was much too tired to respond; and at last, seeing nothing was to be got out of me, she crawled away, and I was speedily between the woollen coverlets—sheets there were none. By five A.M. the gipsy Knut was in attendance, with a small son to help him; and on a most inspiriting morning we skirted along the lake, and began to mount the heights. The haze that still hung about the water, and filled the shadowy nooks between the mountains, lent an ineffable grandeur to them, which the mid-day atmosphere, when the sun is high in heaven, fails to communicate.

Leaving my coolies to advance up the track, I thought I would take a short cut to the summit of the pass, when I came unexpectedly upon a lake, which stretched right and left, and compelled me to retrace my steps for some distance. As I scrambled along fallen rocks, my leg slipped through a small opening into a perfect cavern. Thank God, the limb was not broken, as the guide could not have heard my cries, and I might have ceased to be, and become a tissue of dry bones (de mortuo nil nisi bonum), long before I could have been discovered. That old raven overhead there, who gave that exulting croak as I fell, you’re reckoning this time without your host. See, I have got my leg out of the trap; and off we hurry from the ill-omened spot. Those ravens are said to be the ghosts of murdered persons who have been hidden away on the moors by their murderers, and have not received Christian burial.

What a delicious breeze refreshed me as I stood, piping hot, on the top of the pass. Half-an-hour of this let loose upon London would be better than flushing the sewers. It was genuine North Sea, iced with passing over the vast white Folgefond. There it lies full in front of us, like a huge winding-sheet, enwrapping the slumbering Jotuns, those Titanic embodiments of nature in her sternest and most rugged mood, with which the imagination of the sons of Odin delighted to people the fastnesses of their adopted home.

As we had ascended, the trees had become, both in number and size, small by degrees and beautifully less, until they ceased altogether, and the landscape turned into nothing but craggy, sterile rockscape. This order of things as we now descended was inverted, and I was not sorry to get once more into the region of verdure.

At length we arrive at Seligenstad, where, to avoid the crowd of questioners, I sit down on a box, in the passage, to the great astonishment of the good folks. The German who has preceded me has been more communicative: “He is from Hanover; is second master in a Gymnasium; is thirty years old; has so many dollars a year; is married; and expects a letter from his wife at Bergen.”

When the buzz had subsided, and nobody is looking, one girl, dressed in the Hardanger costume, viz., a red bodice and dark petticoat, with masculine chemise, but with the addition of a white linen cap, shaped like a nimbus by means of a concealed wooden-frame, comes and sits on a milk-pail beside me. At my request she sings a lullaby or two. One of them ran thus:—

I vow that the touching address of the daughter of Acrisius to her nursling, in the Greek Anthology, never sounded so sweetly to me in my school-boy days, as did the lullaby I had just heard. I’m sure the girl will make a good mamma. Perhaps she’s thinking of the time when that will happen.

Another—

A strapping peasant lad, joining our tÊte-À-tÊte, I bantered him on the subject of sweethearts.

“You’ve got one. Now, tell me what you sing to her.”

With a look of nonchalance, which thinly covered over an abundance of sheepishness, the rustic swain pooh-poohed the idea, and, in defiance, sang the following—

“That’s very fine, no doubt,” interrupted the girl; “but he’s got a kjÆrste (sweetheart) for all that, and I’ll tell you what he sings to her:—

The girl had completely turned the tables on the said flippant young fellow, who, by his looks, abundantly owned the soft impeachment.

Taking leave of these good folks, I pursued my downward course along the river, which was, however, hidden by trees and rocks. Suddenly, however, we got a sight of the torrent in an unexpected manner. The earth at our feet had sunk into a deep, well-like hole, leaving, however, between it and the stream, a great arch of living rock, crowned with trees like the Prebischthor in the Saxon Switzerland, only smaller. Soon after this, we pass a picturesque bridge (Horbro), where the river roars through a deep and very narrow chasm, terrible to look down into; and, after some hours’ walking, get the first peep into the placid lake of Hildal, with two great waterfalls descending the opposite mountain, as if determined to give Éclat to the river’s entrance therein. Visions of Bavarian beer, fresh meat, clean sheets, &c., crowd upon my imagination, as, after catching some trout in crossing the lake, we land on the little isthmus which separates the sheet of fresh water from the beautiful salt-water SÖrfjord; and with light foot I hasten down to Mr. M——’s, the merchant of Odde. The situation is one of the grandest in Norway. The mighty Hardanger Fjord, after running westward out of the Northern Ocean for about eighty miles, suddenly takes a bend south, and forms the SÖr (South) Fjord, which is nearly thirty miles long. At the very extreme end of this glorious water defile I now stood. To my left shoot down the sloping abutments of the mountain plateau, on which lies the vast snow-field called the Folgefond; they, with their flounce-like bands of trees, first fir, then birch, and above this mere scrub, are now immersed in shadow, blending in the distance with the indigo waters of the Fjord. But further out to seaward, as we glance over the dark shoulder of one of these natural buttresses, rises a swelling mound of white, like the heaving bosom of some queenly beauty robed in black velvet. That is a bit of “Folgo” yet glowing with the radiance of the setting sun. As I stood gazing at this wonderful scene—the snow part of it reminding me of the unsullied Jungfrau, as seen from Interlacken, only that there the water, which gives such effect to this scene, is absent—I saw a man rise from behind a stranded boat in front of me. He was a German painter, and had been transferring to his canvas the very sight I had been looking on.

“Eine wunderschÖne Aussicht, Mein Herr,” remarked I.

“Unvergleichbar! We’ve nothing like it even in Switzerland,” said he.

With this observation I think I can safely leave the scenery in the reader’s hands.

“That church, there,” said the German, pointing to a little ancient edifice of stone, with mere slits of windows, “is said to have been built by your countrymen, as well as those of Kinservik and Ullensvang, further down the fjord. They had a great timber trade, according to tradition, with this part of the country. But, to judge from that breastwork and foss yonder, the good people of the valley were favoured at times with other visits besides those of timber merchants.”