But the greatest joy of all is the sight of a wide marsh covered with the delicious multebær, whose luscious, yellow fruit and gold-red leaves brighten the country-side. This is the cloudberry, found in Scotland and in the North of England, and to come on a stretch of this fruit after a long, hot walk is a thing worth living for. Besides this best of all Norse wild fruits, the fjelds produce many excellent berries, such as crowberries, whortleberries, marsh whortleberries, bearberries, dewberries, cranberries, and others. The children of the country parts all over Norway spend much of their time in feasting on these little fruits, and during the summer and autumn months their hands and faces are generally well stained with the dark juice.
Upwards, beyond these pleasant pastures, when you have left behind the last sæter-shanty and the last thicket of birches, you reach a world where, except for the scattered Tourist Club huts and their summer caretakers, you cannot count on coming across either dwelling or human being.
Wandering far afield, you may meet a couple of Lapps with their herd of reindeer, and down by one of the tarns you may chance on a rough stone shelter, inhabited for the time being by two Norwegian fishermen, whose nets are laid in the mountain lake.
All over this lofty wilderness the snow lies deep for several months of the year, but as soon as it begins to thaw it disappears rapidly, when, as in Switzerland, Nature’s garden immediately blossoms forth in all its glory. It must be confessed, however, that the carpet of Alpine flowers on the Norwegian high-fjelds cannot compare with that of Switzerland. On the great mountain plateau of Norway everything gives way to the lichen-like reindeer moss, and the flowers are merely in patches, or growing in masses only in those swampy parts where the moss does not thrive.
The fjelds furnish a recreation-ground for the Norwegian townsman. There he can lead the life that he loves best, and one week of the wilds will set him up for the remainder of the year. Even though he cares nothing for shooting or fishing, the sense of freedom as he does his daily tramp delights his soul. And his wife or his sister as often as not will accompany him, for the Norwegian ladies are brave walkers, and know how to rough it.
But the majority of Norsemen are good sportsmen and good fishermen, and in most seasons there are plenty of fjeld-ryper to be shot and good hauls of trout to be made in the mountain lakes and connecting streams.
But what is the country like up here on the very summit of everything? It is called a plateau; but that does not mean that it is absolutely level, for, as a matter of fact, there is no part of it level enough to be made into a football ground. It is all up and down, and every here and there are low hills, with occasionally great prominent, rounded mountain-tops, rising to a height of 500 or 600 feet above the plateau. Then there are chains of lakes, often several miles in length, acres of swampy ground in every direction, shallow ravines filled with a jumble of rocks and boulders, and constant sand mounds, partly overgrown with grass and dwarf juniper. And up here are the snowfields, about which we shall have more to say presently.
It is all weird and wild and wonderful, and if there be no wind the silence is intense, and only broken by the bark of an Arctic fox from some rocky hillside or by the plaintive call of a golden plover.
Why, it may be asked, should anyone wish to go to such a desolate place? Only to shoot or to fish, to gather in a store of the purest air in the world, or perhaps to enjoy a period of calm and quiet solitude—world-forgetting, by the world forgot.
