But I was much too tired to respond; and at last, seeing nothing was to be got out of me, she crawled away, and I was speedily between the woollen coverlets—sheets there were none. By five A.M. the gipsy Knut was in attendance, with a small son to help him; and on a most inspiriting morning we skirted along the lake, and began to mount the heights. The haze that still hung about the water, and filled the shadowy nooks between the mountains, lent an ineffable grandeur to them, which the mid-day atmosphere, when the sun is high in heaven, fails to communicate.
Leaving my coolies to advance up the track, I thought I would take a short cut to the summit of the pass, when I came unexpectedly upon a lake, which stretched right and left, and compelled me to retrace my steps for some distance. As I scrambled along fallen rocks, my leg slipped through a small opening into a perfect cavern. Thank God, the limb was not broken, as the guide could not have heard my cries, and I might have ceased to be, and become a tissue of dry bones (de mortuo nil nisi bonum), long before I could have been discovered. That old raven overhead there, who gave that exulting croak as I fell, you’re reckoning this time without your host. See, I have got my leg out of the trap; and off we hurry from the ill-omened spot. Those ravens are said to be the ghosts of murdered persons who have been hidden away on the moors by their murderers, and have not received Christian burial.
What a delicious breeze refreshed me as I stood, piping hot, on the top of the pass. Half-an-hour of this let loose upon London would be better than flushing the sewers. It was genuine North Sea, iced with passing over the vast white Folgefond. There it lies full in front of us, like a huge winding-sheet, enwrapping the slumbering Jotuns, those Titanic embodiments of nature in her sternest and most rugged mood, with which the imagination of the sons of Odin delighted to people the fastnesses of their adopted home.
As we had ascended, the trees had become, both in number and size, small by degrees and beautifully less, until they ceased altogether, and the landscape turned into nothing but craggy, sterile rockscape. This order of things as we now descended was inverted, and I was not sorry to get once more into the region of verdure.
At length we arrive at Seligenstad, where, to avoid the crowd of questioners, I sit down on a box, in the passage, to the great astonishment of the good folks. The German who has preceded me has been more communicative: “He is from Hanover; is second master in a Gymnasium; is thirty years old; has so many dollars a year; is married; and expects a letter from his wife at Bergen.”
When the buzz had subsided, and nobody is looking, one girl, dressed in the Hardanger costume, viz., a red bodice and dark petticoat, with masculine chemise, but with the addition of a white linen cap, shaped like a nimbus by means of a concealed wooden-frame, comes and sits on a milk-pail beside me. At my request she sings a lullaby or two. One of them ran thus:—
Heigho and heigho!
My small one, how are you?
Indeed but you’re brave and well: