Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

And so we came to Bergen in the bright midnight of the last of our four days.

Months afterwards Sanna sent me a few extracts from descriptions given by a Norwegian writer of some of the spots we had seen in the dim upper distances along the fjords,—some of those illuminated spaces of green high up among the crags, which looked such sunny and peaceful homes.

Her English is so much more graphic than mine that I have begged her permission to give the extracts as she wrote them:—

"Grand, glorious, and serious is the Sogne Fjord. Serious in itself, and still more serious we find it when we know where and how people do live there between mountains. And we must wonder or ask, Is there really none places left, or no kind of work for those people to get for the maintenance of the life, but to go to such desolate and rather impassable a place?...

"More than half of the year are the two families who live on the farm of Vetti separated from all other human beings. During the winter can the usual path in the grass not be passed in case of snow, ice, and perpetual slips, which leave behind trace long out in the summer, because the sun only for a short time came over this long enormous abyss, and does not linger there long, so that the snow which has been to ice do melt very slow, and seldom disappear earlier than in July. The short time in the winter when the river Utla is frozen may the bottom of the pass well be passed, though not without danger, on account of the mentioned slips, which, with the power of the hurricane, are whizzing down in the deep, and which merely pressure of the air is so strong that it throw all down.

"Late in the autumn and in the spring is all approach to and from Vetti quite stopped; and late in the autumn chiefly with ground and snow slips, which then get loosened by the frequent rain. The farm-houses is situate on a steep slope, so that the one end of the lowest beam is put on the mere ground, and the other end must be put on a wall almost three yards high. The fields are so steep, and so quite near the dreadful precipice, that none unaccustomed to it do venture one's self thither; and when one from here look over the pass, and look the meadows which is more hanging than laying over the deep, and which have its grass mowed down with a short scythe, then one cannot comprehend the desperate courage which risk to set about and occupy one's self here, while the abyss has opened its swallow for receiving the foolhardy.

"A little above the dwelling-houses is a quite tolerable plain; and when one ask the man why he has not built his houses there, he answers that owing to the snow-slips it is impossible to build there.

"Through the valley-streams the Afdals River comes from the mountains, run in a distance of only twenty yards from the farm-houses, and about one hundred yards from the same pour out itself with crash of thunder in a mighty foss. The rumble of the same, and that with its hurling out caused pressure of the air, is in the summer so strong that the dwelling-houses seems to shiver, and all what fluids there in open vessels get placed on the table is on an incessant trembling, moving almost as on board a ship in a rough sea. The wall and windows which turns to the river are then always moistened of the whipped foam, which in small particles continually is thrown back from the foss.

"By the side of this foss, in the hard granite wall which it moisten, is a mined gut (the author says he can't call it a road, though it is reckoned for that), broad enough that one man, and in the highest one small well-trained horse, however not by each other's side, can walk therein. This gut, which vault is not so high that an full-grown man can walk upright, is the farm's only road which rise to a considerable height.

"But as this gut could not get lightened in a suitable height, one has filled up or finished the remaining gap with four timber beams, four or five yards long, which is close to the gut, and with its upper end leans on a higher small mountain peak, which beside this is the fastening for the bridge over the waterfall. In these beams is cut in flukes, just as the steps of a staircase, and when one walks up these flukes one looks between the beams the frothing foss beneath one's self, while one get wrapped up of its exhalation clouds.