A really fine waterfall is a most fascinating thing. Long before you reach it you hear the roar of the water, and see the spray ascending like steam from a boiling caldron. Then when you stand before it, you gaze in wonder on the never-ending rush of water, hurtling in one great mass from top to bottom of the lofty cliff, or leaping in mighty bounds from ledge to ledge.

Nowhere in Europe can one see such a variety of waterfalls as in Norway, for every district has its fos, and in some districts the cascades are innumerable. In the Romsdal, for instance, an English traveller once counted within a mile no fewer than seventy-three waterfalls, “none of which were less than 1,000 feet high, while some plunged down 2,000 feet.” But the majority of these would only consist of a single thread of water, not of that great, broad sheet which is the feature of the more famous falls.

Which of Norway’s many waterfalls is the finest is a matter of opinion. Some people give the palm to the Rjukanfos (Telemarken), some to the SkjÆggedalsfos1 (or Ringedalsfos), some to the VÖringfos, while others maintain that the Vettifos, the Tvindefos, and the Tyssedalsfos are without rivals. The fact is that each of these (and other falls which could be named) has its own particular charm, and the last one visited always seems to be the best. A great deal also depends on the time of year, and on the amount of snow which has fallen on the mountains during the preceding winter. For, it must be remembered, it is the rapid melting of the snow in the spring that gives to most of the Norwegian waterfalls such a volume of water in the early months of the year.

But the summer rainfall on the high fjelds is always heavy, and even after all the snow of the year has melted, an immense amount of water has to drain away to the lowlands, and so to the sea. At first it collects in the tarns which fill the hollows of the mountain plateaux, but these, overflowing, soon send their surplus water by certain channels away over the cliffs.

The greater waterfalls, however, are those which indirectly carry off the water from the snowfields, the mountains capped with perpetual snow; for, except during the frost-bound months of winter, these falls are always full.

The snowfields are of themselves of immense interest, but so intimately are they connected with the glaciers that we shall speak of the two together. A snowfield may exist without a glacier, but a glacier cannot exist without a snowfield—that is to say, the glacier is made by the snowfield.

How snowfields came into existence nobody knows for certain, but it is generally supposed by learned people who have studied the matter that, thousands of years ago, after what is called the Great Ice Age, Norway gradually put off her mantle of ice and snow and became what she is now; but the snow on the higher parts of the land has never yet had time to melt right away, because fresh snow is always falling and adding to the pile. And it is the weight of all this fresh snow on the top of the accumulation of centuries which produces the glaciers.

The Folgefond, in the Hardanger district, is the snowfield which most people who visit Norway see sooner or later, and since it covers an area of 120 square miles, at a height of about 5,500 feet above the sea, it is visible from a great many points of view. It forms a background to many a picture of the varied scenery of the Hardanger Fjord, and it has the advantage of being easily accessible.

Of course, the belief in the old popular legends is dying out even in Norway, but there are still some aged grandfathers and grandmothers living near the great snowfield who can tell the tales as they were told to them. Thus they relate that where the Folgefond now lies was once a fertile and well-peopled valley, called Folgedalen, and that in one night its farms, forests, people, and cattle were buried in snow as a judgment for some great sin. One story ascribes the misfortune to the curse of a gipsy woman, who had been refused alms by the priest; while another relates that the valley was overwhelmed because the inhabitants had murdered their liege lord, the petty King of the district.

But why it happened and how it happened does not really much matter, for there the vast field of snow is to-day, and there it will doubtless remain for many centuries to come. As has been said, you can go up to the top of it and sleigh across a portion of its summit, or you can potter round about it and examine its many glaciers.

The two largest glaciers of the Folgefond are the Buar BrÆ, near Odda, and the Bondhus BrÆ, near Sundal, and to spend a day at either of them is a real treat. But it is not wise to visit these glaciers without someone who knows them, for one might easily fall into one of the great fissures in the ice, known as crevasses, especially if lately-fallen snow had hidden the opening of the mighty crack.

A glacier, as most people know (now that everyone goes to Switzerland, if not to Norway), is nothing more than a river of ice; not a nice, clean, smooth sheet of ice, but a rough mass of frozen billows, almost blue in colour, and generally covered with sand, dust, and stones of all sizes. Wherever, beneath the edge of a snowfield, the country shapes itself into a valley, there you will find a glacier.

If you make a snowball, and keep pressing and kneading it in your hands, you will soon convert it into a solid lump of ice. That is just what the sun does to the snowfield. It keeps melting the new snow, and this presses down into the old snow, so that the weight of the whole thing squeezes out the frozen snow into the valleys in the form of glaciers. And, as this process goes on year after year, the glacier would naturally keep going lower and lower down into the valley were it not for the fact that the point (or snout, as it is termed) of the glacier very frequently breaks off, and disappears into the torrent of ice-water which flows away from it. So some glaciers, although always moving, never grow any longer, but others creep a little bit farther down each year.

There are many other interesting things about a glacier. One of them is the moraine, which consists of heaps of rocks and stones broken off from the edges of the valley by the great river of ice as it pushes its way imperceptibly forward. These rocks are embedded in the ice or borne on its surface, and are only given up when the extremity of the glacier melts away into the torrent. Some of the rocks thus transported are of immense weight, and the torrent is powerless to move them; year by year, therefore, the jumbled heap of boulders and rocks is added to until it often grows to an enormous size.

Another fine snowfield in the Hardanger district is the JÖkul, a splendid white dome, whose melting snows help to swell the VÖringfos. The JÖkul does not possess many large glaciers, but one of them has, in past years, been a great source of trouble to the people who live near it. This is the Rembesdal glacier, at the far end of the Simodal Valley, near Eidfjord.

The Simodal is a beautiful and fertile valley, with farms on either bank of the river, which rushes through it to the fjord. This river comes from the glacier, but not directly. The head of the valley is choked by a high cliff, over which tumbles a grand waterfall, and this issues from a large mountain lake, into the opposite end of which descends the snout of the glacier, with a continuous stream of milky water flowing from it. So far there is nothing peculiar in all this, but the peculiarity lies higher up.

Some little distance up the glacier, and almost at right angles to one side of it, is a rocky hollow or small valley, and into this the water begins to pour in the spring as soon as the sun is strong enough to begin to melt the snow. The great glacier blocks up the end of this hollow with a thick dam of ice, and before long a huge lake is formed.

What used to happen every two or three years was that the pressure of the water in this dammed-up lake became so tremendous that the glacier at last could resist it no longer. Away went the side and lower part of the glacier, and with one mighty crash the water escaped. Down into the lower lake, and over the waterfall, the wall of solid water, several feet in height, descended into the valley. There it carried destruction far and wide, sweeping away crops, cattle, farm buildings, bridges, and everything that came in its way. The loss of life also was often considerable, for there was no warning other than the roar of the water as it burst into the valley.

A few years ago, however, some Norwegian engineers devised a means of averting these terrible floods by enabling the upper lake to empty itself gradually. They constructed under the glacier an iron-lined tunnel, connecting the upper lake with the lower, and in this way the water escaped at once. So the people of Simodal can now sleep in peace.