Author visits a glacier—Meets with two compatriots—A good year for bears—The judgment of snow—Effects of parsley fern on horses—The advantage of having shadow—Old friends of the hill tribe—Skeggedals foss—Fairy strings—The ugliest dale in Norway—A photograph of omnipotence—The great Bondehus glacier—Record of the mysterious ice period—Guide stories—A rock on its travels.
Next day I went across the Hildal Lake to visit a glacier of which I had got a glimpse the evening before. It then seemed a couple of miles off; but I never was more taken in in judging of distance before—such is the uncommon clearness of the atmosphere and the gigantic scale of objects in this country. After a sweltering walk, however, of nearly three hours, I at last stood at the spot, where a torrent of water, the exact colour of that perennial sewer that comes to the light of day, and diffuses its fragrance just below London Bridge, rushed out of an archway of the purest azure, setting me a moralizing about deceitful appearances, and so forth. My boy-guide halted the while at a respectful distance from the convulsed mass of ice.
“Do let me go back,” he had apostrophized me; “I am so frightened, I am. It is sure to fall on us.”
And it was only by yielding to his cowardly entreaties that I prevented him from imitating the trickling ice, and being dissolved in tears.
Close to the ice grew white and red clover, yellow trefoil, two kinds of sorrel, and buttercups. This fertility on the edge of a howling desert had been taken advantage of, for, as I moved my eye to the opposite cliff from taking a look at the sun, who had just hidden his scorching glare behind the tips of the glacier, I descried several men and women busily engaged, at an enormous height, making hay on a slope of great steepness. As we descended, a noise, as of a salute of cannon, greeted my ears. The above sewer, which descends with most prodigious force, had set agoing some stones apparently of great size, which thundered high even above the roar of the waters, making the rocks and nodding groves rebellow again.
Next day I had determined to cross “Folgo” to the Mauranger Fjord, but the clouds hanging over him forbid the attempt.
That evening it cleared up, and two compatriots from the Emerald Isle arriving by water, we agreed to join forces the next day.
On the 20th of August, at an early hour, we started with two guides, one Ole Olsen Bustetun, and Jörgen Olsen Præstergaard. The latter was a very grave-looking personage, with a blue face and red-tipped nose, which, however, told untrue tales.
“Well, Jörgen,” said I, “how are you off for bears this year?”