Yours as ever,
Aylmer.
TENTH LETTER
Norwegian fjord scenery; the “Seven Sisters” and “Pulpit Rock”; a comparison of the Sogne and Hardanger type of beauty; a drowned village; the cliff, Hornelen; the “City of Roses”; Björnstjerne Björnson; over the Romsdal-Gudbrandsdal route by carriole; an atmospheric kaleidoscope; the land of the “fos”; some Norwegian characteristics illustrated by the “skydsgut”; the “sæter” huts on the “fjeld”; Norwegian fauna; the terror of a lemming raid; “into the valley of death rode the six hundred”; a strange shipwreck; the giants of the Sogne; Balholm and Longfellow; Leif Eriksson; “The Skeleton in Armor.”
Marok, Geiranger Fjord, June 27.
My dear Judicia,
Have you ever seen the ocean so still that there was not a single, tiniest wind-made ripple on it; when a rowboat left a broadening wake a quarter of a mile long, and when the circling sea gulls could signal to their images beneath? If not, I wish you could transport yourself by telegraph here to Marok. Here in this quiet, mountain-guarded Geiranger Fjord, eighty miles or so from the open sea, it is even calmer than the proverbial mill pond. It is not the stagnant calm of the mill pond either, suggesting green slime and malarial gases, but a clear, fresh, healthy calm, suggesting only peace and shelter from the elements. Probably the fjord’s surface will not long be left unmolested. Soon a breeze will come creeping around the turn of the Sunelvsfjord, or down the dal, from the frozen Lake Djupvand.
