Next day I went across the Hildal Lake to visit a glacier of which I had got a glimpse the evening before. It then seemed a couple of miles off; but I never was more taken in in judging of distance before—such is the uncommon clearness of the atmosphere and the gigantic scale of objects in this country. After a sweltering walk, however, of nearly three hours, I at last stood at the spot, where a torrent of water, the exact colour of that perennial sewer that comes to the light of day, and diffuses its fragrance just below London Bridge, rushed out of an archway of the purest azure, setting me a moralizing about deceitful appearances, and so forth. My boy-guide halted the while at a respectful distance from the convulsed mass of ice.

“Do let me go back,” he had apostrophized me; “I am so frightened, I am. It is sure to fall on us.”

And it was only by yielding to his cowardly entreaties that I prevented him from imitating the trickling ice, and being dissolved in tears.

Close to the ice grew white and red clover, yellow trefoil, two kinds of sorrel, and buttercups. This fertility on the edge of a howling desert had been taken advantage of, for, as I moved my eye to the opposite cliff from taking a look at the sun, who had just hidden his scorching glare behind the tips of the glacier, I descried several men and women busily engaged, at an enormous height, making hay on a slope of great steepness. As we descended, a noise, as of a salute of cannon, greeted my ears. The above sewer, which descends with most prodigious force, had set agoing some stones apparently of great size, which thundered high even above the roar of the waters, making the rocks and nodding groves rebellow again.

Next day I had determined to cross “Folgo” to the Mauranger Fjord, but the clouds hanging over him forbid the attempt.

That evening it cleared up, and two compatriots from the Emerald Isle arriving by water, we agreed to join forces the next day.

On the 20th of August, at an early hour, we started with two guides, one Ole Olsen Bustetun, and JÖrgen Olsen PrÆstergaard. The latter was a very grave-looking personage, with a blue face and red-tipped nose, which, however, told untrue tales.

“Well, JÖrgen,” said I, “how are you off for bears this year?”

“Hereabouts, not so bad; but yonder at Ulsvig they are very troublesome. It was only the other day that Ulsvig’s priest was going to one of his churches, when a bear attacked him. By good luck he had his hound with him—a very big one it is—and it attacked the bear behind, and bothered him, and so the priest managed to escape.”

“Aren’t there some old sagas about the Folgefond?” asked I.

“To be sure. I know one, but it is not true.”

“True or not true, let me hear it.”

“Well, then, it is said among the bonders that once on a time under all this mountain of ice and snow there was a valley, called Folgedal, with no less than seven parishes in it. But the dalesmen were a proud and ungodly crew, and God determined to destroy them as He did Sodom and Gomorrah—not by fire, however, but by snow. So He caused it to snow in the valley for ten weeks running. As you may suppose, the valley got filled up. The church spires were covered, and not a living soul survived. And from that day to this the ice and snow has gone on increasing. They also say that in olden days there used to be a strange sight of birds of all colours, white, and black, and green, and red, and yellow, fluskering about over the snow, and people would have it that these were nothing but the spirits of the inhabitants lingering about the place of their former abodes.”

“That’s a strange story, no doubt,” said I.

“And, now I think of it,” continued JÖrgen, “I’ve heard old men say that this tale of the snowing-up must be true, for, now and then, when there has been a flom (flood), pieces of hewn timber, as if they had belonged to a house, and household implements, such as copper kettles, have been brought down by the stream that comes out of Overhus Glacier.

“Now and then, too, the traveller over Folgo is said to hear strange noises, as of church bells ringing and dogs barking. But the fact is, there’s something so lonely and grewsome about the Fond, and the ice is so apt to split and the snow to fall, that no wonder people get such-like fancies into their heads.”

As we ascend I see tufts of a dark green herb growing in the crevices of the grey rocks.

“Ah! that’s spraengehesten (horse burster),” said JÖrgen. “If a horse eats of this a stoppage of the bowels immediately takes place. A horse at Berge, below there, was burst in this way not long ago.”

[The reader may remember that a similar account was given me last year on the Sogne-fjeld].[30]

We had now emerged from the thickets, and, after crossing a mauvais pas of slippery rock, touched the snow after four hours’ hard walking. The glare of the sun on the snow was rather trying to the eyes, I congratulated myself that I was not shadowless, like Peter Schlemil, as it was a great relief to me to cast my vision on my own lateral shadow as we proceeded. It was first-rate weather, and the air being northerly, the snow was not very slushy. The German painter ought to be here. He told me his forte is winter landscape.

“Now,” said the grave-faced JÖrgen, who was at bottom a very good sort of intelligent fellow, “look due east, sir, over where the SÖr fjord lies. Yonder is the Foss (waterfall) of Skeggedal, or Tussedal, as some folks call it.”

As I cast my eyes eastward, I saw the highest top of the Hardanger Fjeld, which I traversed last year; my old friend Harteigen very conspicuous with his quaint square head rising to the height of 5400 feet, while his grey sides contrasted with the Storfond to the south and the dazzling white Tresfond and JÖklen to the north.

Straight in a line between myself and Harteigen I now discerned a perpendicular strip of gleaming white chalked upon a stupendous wall of dark rock. That is Skeggedals foss. It falls several hundred feet perpendicularly, but no wonder it looks a mere thread from here, for it is more than fourteen miles off as the crow flies.

“There are three falls at the head of the valley,” continued JÖrgen. “Two of them cross each other at an angle quite wonderful to see. They are called Tusse-straenge (Fairy strings).”

Wonderful music, thought I, must be given forth by those fairy strings, mayhap akin to

“Tussedal is a terribly stÜgt (ugly) dale,” went on JÖrgen, “so narrow, and dark, and deep. A little below those three waterfalls the river enters into the ground, and disappears for some distance, and than comes out again. We call that the Swelge (swallow). Just below that there is a great stone that has fallen across the chasm. It’s just like a bridge: I’ve stood on that stone and looked down many, many ells deep into the water boiling below. Ay! that’s an ugly dale—a very ugly dale. It’s not to be matched in Norway. You ought to have gone to see it; but now I think of it, it’s difficult to get to the falls, for there is a lake to cross, and I think the old boat is stove in now.”

After passing one or two crevasses (spraekker), which become dangerous when the fresh snow comes and covers them over, we at length arrive at the first skiaer (skerry), a sort of Grand Mulets of bare jagged crag, on which the snow did not seem to rest. After lunching here, and drinking a mixture of brandy and ice, we descend a slope of snow by the side of a deep turquoise-coloured gutter, of most serpentine shape, brimful of dashing water. Just beyond this a sight met our eyes never to be effaced from my memory. Far to the westward the ocean is distinctly visible through a film of haze rising from the snow, just thick enough, like the crape on those veiled Italian statues, to enhance its beauty. Between us and the sea, purple ranges of mountains intersect each other, the furthermost melting into the waves. At right angles to these ranges is the Mauranger Fjord, to which we have to descend. There it lies like a mere trough of ink, opening gradually into the main channel of the branching Hardanger, with the island of Varald lying in the centre of it. Over this to the north-west lies Bergen. To the southward, skirting the Mauranger, is a cleft rock, like the BrÈche de Roland in the PyrenÉes, while between it and us may be seen the commencement of the great Bondehus glacier.

Look! the smooth, sloping, snow-covered ice has suddenly got on the qui vive. It’s already on the incline, no drag will stop it; see how it begins to rise into billows and fall into troughs, like the breakers approaching the sea-shore; and yonder it disappears from view between the adamantine buttresses that encroach upon its sweep. To our right is another pseudo glacier hanging from a higher ascent like a blue ball-cloak from the shoulder of a muslin-frocked damsel.

The rochers montonnÉes on which we stand tell tales of that mysterious ice-period when the glacier ground everything down with its powerful emery, while by a curious natural convulsion, a crevasse as broad and nearly as deep as the Box cutting—not of ice but of rock, as if the very rocks had caught the infection, and tried to split in glacial fashion—strikes down to a small black lake dotted with white ice floes.

It was indeed a wondrous scene. As we looked at it, one of my companions observed, one could almost imagine this was the exceeding high mountain whence Satan shewed our Saviour all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. As if to make the thing stranger still, on one of the bleached rocks are carved what one might easily suppose were cabalistic letters, the records of an era obscured in the grey mists of time, but which it is beyond our power to decipher. Above us the sky was cloudless, but wore that dark tinge which as clearly indicates snow beneath as the distant ice-blink of the Arctic regions tells tales to the voyager of a frozen ocean ahead.

“Now were off the Fond,” said JÖrgen. “You laughed at me when I asked you if you had a compass. We’ve made short work of it to-day, but you don’t know what it is when there is a skodda (scud) over Folgo. Twenty-five years ago five Englishmen, who tried to come over with five horses, lost their way in the mist, and had hard work to get back. Why it’s only fourteen days since that I started with three other guides and four Englishmen, but we were forced to return. At this end of the passage there is one outlet, and if you miss that it is impossible to get down into the Mauranger.”

I found he was right; for, after worming our way for a space through a hotch-potch of snow and rocks, we suddenly turned a sharp corner, and stood in a gateway invisible a moment before, from whence a ladder of stone reached down to the hamlet of Ovrehus, at the head of the Fjord, four thousand feet below us.

“Four years ago,” said JÖrgen, “I guided a German state-councilor across the Fond. How he did drink brandviin! I think it was to give him courage. He had a bottle full when he started, and he kept pouring the spirits on to lumps of sugar, and sucking them till the bottle got quite empty and he quite drunk. We could not get him a step further than this, and night was coming on. I had to go down to Ovrehus, and get four men with lanterns, and at last we got him down at two o’clock in the morning.”

JÖrgen thought the traveller was a German, but I suspect if the real truth were known, it must have been our friend the Danish Count, whose propensity for drink and other peculiarities have been recorded in the Oxonian in Norway. The descent was uncommonly steep, even in the opinion of one of my companions, who had ascended the Col du GÉant, and the stiffest passes in the Tyrol.

After descending in safety, we entered a belt of alder copse-wood. In one part of this the ground had been ploughed up, and the trees torn away and smashed right and left, as if some huge animal had rushed through it, or rather, as if two or three Great Western locomotives had run off the line and bolted across country. What could it be! The gash, I found, reached to a torrent of fierce snow-water, in the centre of which a rock of a great many tons weight had come to an anchor. This was the corpus delicti. Looking at the cliffs, I could discern several hundred feet above me the mark of a recent dislocation, whence the monster had started. The rupture had occurred only two or three days before. What a grand sight it must have been.