A LITTLE FARM ON THE RIVERSIDE AT GJORA
It is possible that, knowing that the expectant farmer at the avoided station would telephone to the station on either side of him, the driver preferred not to face them until their anger should have calmed and he should have had time to invent some excuse. I do not know to what extent he expected to be blamed; but I am afraid the man we telephoned to must have been rather mad, and so I imagine that we were driven to this quaint spot because there our sin would not find us out. Inadvertently I left a large silver scent-bottle there, and acknowledged the loss to be a judgment on me when I found it impossible to find the place again.
When we arrived we went to bed. In the morning we had coffee and bread and jam; and Nico painted. At three o'clock we were hungry, and when at length preparations for a meal were made our appetites were ravenous. A dear little girl waited on us—a very pretty child, with beautiful hair. She brought on the table a few slices of thick and very fat raw bacon and some caraway-seed bread. Hungry as we were, we could not eat that. We tried to ask her what more there was. She left the room, and soon came back carrying the pièce de resistance of our meal—two soup plates filled with a paste made of flour and water, such as we used to employ in the days of scrap-books. On the top of this floated a little melted butter. With this she brought a basin of powdered cinnamon. That was our Sunday dinner. They were such sweet people that we feared to hurt their feelings, and Nico ate all his plateful and half of mine. The half that was left we divided between our plates, which then looked quite empty enough. We ate caraway-seed bread for supper and caraway-seed bread for breakfast. With the help of our phrase book, we gathered that they never ate meat and very rarely had fresh fish.
OSTRE KANALHAVN, TRONDHJEM
The place is situated on water which, I suppose, is a fjord, and there are three or four houses besides the one at which we stayed. They made us understand that they were not in any way prepared for guests, and had some difficulty in providing us with a horse and cart. I should be very much interested to know the name of this little place. It is within two hours' drive of Molde, and as far as I could make out it had scarcely ever been visited by the foreign traveller. We were astonished to find ourselves so near to this big town, for we had calculated that we had at least another half-day's journey to make; which proves again that somewhere we had overstepped our mark.
Molde is the most beautifully situated town in Norway. It has a population of 1800 souls. It is a very important port of call for all the steamers which coast between Bergen, Trondhjem, and the North. The town is built along the mouth of the Romsdal Fjord, and from almost any point a view of the grand Romsdal Mountains is to be obtained. The panorama on a clear day is gorgeous. To see the sun setting over the fjord and its background of snow-tipped peaks is to have a vision of fairy-like colour and beauty that takes one's breath away. All over Norway as one passes through the valleys and the winding fjords picture after picture are witnessed in rich succession, each seeming more beautiful than the last; but now, as at a certain distance of time I endeavour to recall their individual charms, I think that these glorious evenings in Molde occupy the most pleasant place in the memory of one of Norway's ardent admirers.
How rash thus to limit one's enthusiasm! From Molde we went by steamer to Næs, and, after resting awhile at an hotel and eating an excellent supper, took a miraculously comfortable stolkjærre and had a long drive to Horgheim in the brilliant moonlight. I wonder how many visitors to the Romsdal have done the same? Imagine the charm of it. The delicate jagged edges of the mountains on the right of the road stand sharp and clear against the blueness of the sky; as the road winds in and out the Romsdal Horn reveals or conceals herself bathed in moonlight; innumerable waterfalls foam down from the heights with plashing music, looking like silver streamers hung out to decorate the beautiful way of some mystic procession. Our driver was for the time an affinity: no longer a guide in our pay, or in that of the hotel, taking tourists through a world-renowned stretch of scenery, but a romantic Norseman slowly opening out to us a valley of delight, his possession by inheritance and love.