Of that strange lyre whose strings
The genii of the breezes sweep.”
“Tussedal is a terribly stügt (ugly) dale,” went on Jörgen, “so narrow, and dark, and deep. A little below those three waterfalls the river enters into the ground, and disappears for some distance, and than comes out again. We call that the Swelge (swallow). Just below that there is a great stone that has fallen across the chasm. It’s just like a bridge: I’ve stood on that stone and looked down many, many ells deep into the water boiling below. Ay! that’s an ugly dale—a very ugly dale. It’s not to be matched in Norway. You ought to have gone to see it; but now I think of it, it’s difficult to get to the falls, for there is a lake to cross, and I think the old boat is stove in now.”
After passing one or two crevasses (spraekker), which become dangerous when the fresh snow comes and covers them over, we at length arrive at the first skiaer (skerry), a sort of Grand Mulets of bare jagged crag, on which the snow did not seem to rest. After lunching here, and drinking a mixture of brandy and ice, we descend a slope of snow by the side of a deep turquoise-coloured gutter, of most serpentine shape, brimful of dashing water. Just beyond this a sight met our eyes never to be effaced from my memory. Far to the westward the ocean is distinctly visible through a film of haze rising from the snow, just thick enough, like the crape on those veiled Italian statues, to enhance its beauty. Between us and the sea, purple ranges of mountains intersect each other, the furthermost melting into the waves. At right angles to these ranges is the Mauranger Fjord, to which we have to descend. There it lies like a mere trough of ink, opening gradually into the main channel of the branching Hardanger, with the island of Varald lying in the centre of it. Over this to the north-west lies Bergen. To the southward, skirting the Mauranger, is a cleft rock, like the Brèche de Roland in the Pyrenées, while between it and us may be seen the commencement of the great Bondehus glacier.
Look! the smooth, sloping, snow-covered ice has suddenly got on the qui vive. It’s already on the incline, no drag will stop it; see how it begins to rise into billows and fall into troughs, like the breakers approaching the sea-shore; and yonder it disappears from view between the adamantine buttresses that encroach upon its sweep. To our right is another pseudo glacier hanging from a higher ascent like a blue ball-cloak from the shoulder of a muslin-frocked damsel.
The rochers montonnées on which we stand tell tales of that mysterious ice-period when the glacier ground everything down with its powerful emery, while by a curious natural convulsion, a crevasse as broad and nearly as deep as the Box cutting—not of ice but of rock, as if the very rocks had caught the infection, and tried to split in glacial fashion—strikes down to a small black lake dotted with white ice floes.
It was indeed a wondrous scene. As we looked at it, one of my companions observed, one could almost imagine this was the exceeding high mountain whence Satan shewed our Saviour all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. As if to make the thing stranger still, on one of the bleached rocks are carved what one might easily suppose were cabalistic letters, the records of an era obscured in the grey mists of time, but which it is beyond our power to decipher. Above us the sky was cloudless, but wore that dark tinge which as clearly indicates snow beneath as the distant ice-blink of the Arctic regions tells tales to the voyager of a frozen ocean ahead.
“Now were off the Fond,” said Jörgen. “You laughed at me when I asked you if you had a compass. We’ve made short work of it to-day, but you don’t know what it is when there is a skodda (scud) over Folgo. Twenty-five years ago five Englishmen, who tried to come over with five horses, lost their way in the mist, and had hard work to get back. Why it’s only fourteen days since that I started with three other guides and four Englishmen, but we were forced to return. At this end of the passage there is one outlet, and if you miss that it is impossible to get down into the Mauranger.”
I found he was right; for, after worming our way for a space through a hotch-potch of snow and rocks, we suddenly turned a sharp corner, and stood in a gateway invisible a moment before, from whence a ladder of stone reached down to the hamlet of Ovrehus, at the head of the Fjord, four thousand feet below us.
“Four years ago,” said Jörgen, “I guided a German state-councilor across the Fond. How he did drink brandviin! I think it was to give him courage. He had a bottle full when he started, and he kept pouring the spirits on to lumps of sugar, and sucking them till the bottle got quite empty and he quite drunk. We could not get him a step further than this, and night was coming on. I had to go down to Ovrehus, and get four men with lanterns, and at last we got him down at two o’clock in the morning.”