And sure enough I saw the boy first, and then the girl, take off their shoes, and with a hop, spring, and a jump, light on a stone standing out in the torrent, and then on another; and so over with the agility of mountain goats. One false step—an easy matter when the rocks were so slippery—and they would have endangered limb at any rate, for the lin was deep, and worked up to a dangerous pitch of exasperation by the knock-me-down blows that its own gravity was giving it.
Before we emerge from the vast labyrinth of mountain ruin, one overhanging fragment particularly arrests my attention, for, under its eaves, a quantity of martens had constructed their mud habitations, and were darting out and athwart the stream and back again with their muscipular booty, with intense industry. The trout abound in the brook that placidly flows through the little green plain beyond; but, with such a host of winged fly-catchers about, I doubt whether they ever get into season. Here, taking advantage of this little oasis of sweet grass, two or three sæters had been constructed, with the cows and sheep around them. The bald rock, up which our path now lay, was of mica-slate, striped with bands of white felspar; cold and grey, it was void of grass. The beautiful ferns we had left nestling among the clefts far behind, but a bit of stone-crop held its own here and there, and the claret-stalked London Pride asserted its dignity with much pertinacity. There was also abundance of a red flower.
On the bare waterless brow
Of granite ruin, I found a purple flower,
A delicate flower, as fair as aught I trow,
That toys with zephyrs in my lady’s bower.
“Ah!” said Simon, as I picked up some specimens, “it must be nigh thirty years ago that I guided a Thelemarken priest over this Fjeld. He told me the name of that ‘grass’ you’ve got there (a Norwegian calls all flowers ‘grass’) but I don’t mind it now. He had a large box with him, and filled it full of grass and mosses. He was very particular about that black moss under the snow. His name was—let me see—”
“Sommerfeldt,” suggested I, the well-known author of the Supplementum Floræ Laponicæ.
“That’s it!” exclaimed Simon; “quite right.”
The inclined plane, up which we strode, was clearly the work of a glacier. But though there was no ice now, there were crevasses notwithstanding. The mountain was traversed with deep parallel fissures, from a few inches to two or three feet in width. There might have been a score of them—the widest spanned by little bridges of stone, thrown across by the peasants for precaution’s sake.