“Grey.”
“Are there no brown ones?”
“No; they are grey, and in winter snow-white.”
At this instant I heard the well-known cackle of the cock of the brown species, and a large covey of these birds rose out of the covert.
“Well, they are brown,” said he; “now, I never laid mark to (remarked) that before.”
So much for the observation of these people. Never rely upon them for any information respecting birds, beasts, fishes, or plants. All colours are the same to a blind man, and they are such. I take the man’s word, however, for the fact of there being abundance of otters about and reindeer higher up.
Terribly desolate was that Norwegian Fjeld that now lay before us. But setting our faces resolutely to the ascent, we topped it in two and a half hours, the way now and then threading mossy lanes, so to say, sunk between sloping planes of rock. Screeching out in the unharmonious jargon of Vatnedal, which the Sætersdal people, proud of their own musical lungs, call “an alarm,” Ketil pointed to a row of stones upon the ridge similar to those I had seen the day before, also called the Bridal stones, and with a similar legend attached to them. What poverty of invention. Why not call them Funeral stones by way of ringing the changes? But no; the people of this country will escort a bride much further than a bier. The honours of sepulture are done with a niggard grace.
As we now began to descend past beds of unmelted snow, I had a good opportunity of seeing the manifest effect of glacial action upon the rocks, the strata of which had been heaved up perpendicularly. Rounded by the ice in one direction, and quartered by their own cleavage in another, the rocks looked for all the world like a vast dish of sweetbreads; just the sort of tid-bit for that colossal Jotul yonder behind us, with the portentously groggy nose, who stands out in sharp relief against the sky. What Gorgon’s head did that? thought I; as the picture in the National Gallery of Phineus and Co. turned to stone at the banquet occurred to my mind. But my reverie was disturbed by a cry from Ketil of the Bog.
“Catch hold of her tail!”
Which exclamation I not apprehending at the moment, the mare slipped down a smooth sweetbread, and nearly came to grief.