Jörgen thought the traveller was a German, but I suspect if the real truth were known, it must have been our friend the Danish Count, whose propensity for drink and other peculiarities have been recorded in the Oxonian in Norway. The descent was uncommonly steep, even in the opinion of one of my companions, who had ascended the Col du Géant, and the stiffest passes in the Tyrol.
After descending in safety, we entered a belt of alder copse-wood. In one part of this the ground had been ploughed up, and the trees torn away and smashed right and left, as if some huge animal had rushed through it, or rather, as if two or three Great Western locomotives had run off the line and bolted across country. What could it be! The gash, I found, reached to a torrent of fierce snow-water, in the centre of which a rock of a great many tons weight had come to an anchor. This was the corpus delicti. Looking at the cliffs, I could discern several hundred feet above me the mark of a recent dislocation, whence the monster had started. The rupture had occurred only two or three days before. What a grand sight it must have been.
CHAPTER XIV.
Three generations—Dangers of the Folgo—Murray at fault—Author takes boat for the entrance of the Bondehus Valley—The king of the waterfall—More glacier paths—An extensive ice-house—These glorious palaces—How is the harvest?—Laxe-stie—Struggle-stone—To Vikör—Östudfoss, the most picturesque waterfall in Norway—An eternal crystal palace—How to earn a pot of gold—Information for the Morning Post—A parsonage on the Hardanger—Steamers for the Fjords—Why living is becoming dearer in Norway—A rebuke for the travelling English—Sunday morning—Peasants at church—Female head-dresses—A Norwegian church service—Christening—Its adumbration in heathen Norway—A sketch for Washington Irving.
After a very sharp walk of eleven hours in all, we entered a small farm-house. No less than eighteen persons, from the sucking infant to the old woman of eighty-four, surrounded us, as we dipped our wooden spoons into a round tub of sour milk, the only refreshment the place afforded. Red stockings, and blue caps, with an inner one of white, and red bodices, were the chief objects that caught my eye. The ventilation soon became so defective from the crowd, that I got up and succeeded in pushing open a wooden trap-door in the centre of the roof by a pole attached to it. The apartment, in fact, was one of the old “smoke rooms,” described elsewhere, and the orifice, the ancient chimney and window in one, which had been superseded by a modern window and chimney in two. “That’s an awkward place to cross, is that Folgo,” said a big fellow to me. “My grandfather, who lived in Sörfjord, where you come from, was to marry a lass at Ovrehus here. On the day before the wedding he started, with thirteen others, to cross Folgo. Night came, but the party did not arrive. But no harm was done, you see, sir; for I’m his grandson, and if he had been lost I should not have seen the light. [This pleasantry seemed to tickle the crowd.] They did, however, stop all night on the snow, and it was not till next day that they got down.”
From these people I find that there is no foundation for the statement in “Murray,” that a band of peasants lost their lives in crossing the snow. The nearest approach to an accident is that detailed above.
Next morning we take boat for the entrance of the Bondehus valley, which debouches on the Fjord half a mile from this, and opposite to which, across the Fjord, is a place called Fladebo, from which Forbes ascended the Folgefond by a much easier path than that we had taken. Indeed, as we loll easily in the boat, and look back at the descent of yesterday, it seems astonishing how we ever could get down at all. Landing at Bondehus, after an hour’s walk up the valley, which was occupied for some distance by meadows, in which peasants were at work making hay, we reached a lake, across which we row. By the stream, which here shot into the further side of the lake, there were a couple of water ouzels, bobbing about.
“Ay, that’s an Elv-Konge (river king), or, as some call him, Foss-Konge (king of the waterfall),” said our guide.