Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

"O Bob, Bob!" groaned Sanna. "What is to do with you?"

We were to set off for Vossevangen by carriage at three; at half-past two poor Bob was carried, struggling, into the wood-shed, and tied up. His cries were piteous, almost more than we could bear. I am sure he understood the whole plot; but the worst was to come. By somebody's carelessness, the wood-shed door was opened just as we were driving away from the porch. With one convulsive leap and cry, Bob tore his rope from the log to which it was tied, and darted out. The stable boys caught him, and held him fast; his cries were human. Sanna buried her face in her hands and exclaimed, "Oh, say to the driver that he go so fast as he can!" And we drove away, leaving the poor, faithful, loving creature behind, to be sent by express back to Bergen on the steamer the next day. It was like leaving a little child alone among strangers, heart-broken and terrified. When we returned to Bergen we learned that he had touched neither food nor drink till he reached home, late the next night.

To go from Eide to Vossevangen, one must begin by climbing up out of Eide. It is at the bottom of a well, walled by green hills and snow-topped mountains; at the top of the well the country spreads out for a little, only to meet higher hills, higher mountains. Here lies a great lake, rimmed by broad borders of reeds, which shook and glistened in the wind and sun like the spears of half-drowned armies as we passed. Clumps and groves of ash-trees on the shores of this lake looked like huge clumsy torches set in the ground: their tops had been cut down again and again, till they had grown as broad as they were high. The leaves are used for the feed of sheep, and the boughs for firewood; and as in the frugal Norwegian living nothing that can be utilized is left to lie idle, never an ash-tree has the chance to shoot up, become tall and full of leaf. Magpies flitted in and out among them.

"One is for sorrow, and two are for joy, three must be a marriage, and four do bring good fortune, we do say in Norway," said Sanna. "But I think we shall have all sorrow and joy, and to be married many times over, if it be true," she added, as the noisy, showy creatures continued to cross our road by twos and threes.

High up on the hills, just in the edge of snow patches, sæters were to be seen, their brown roofs looking as much a part of the lonely Nature as did the waterfalls and the pine-trees. On all sides shone the water,—trickling fosses down precipices, outbursting fosses from ravines and dells; just before us rose a wall some three thousand feet high, over which leaped a foaming cataract.

"We shall go there," said Sanna, pointing up to it. Sure enough, we did. By loops so oval and narrow they seemed twisted as if to thread their way, as eyes of needles are threaded, the road wound and doubled, and doubled and wound, six times crossing the hill front in fifteen hundred feet. At each double, the valley sank below us; the lake sank; the hills which walled the lake sank; the road was only a broad rift among piled bowlders. In many places these bowlders were higher than our heads; but there was no sense of danger, for the road was a perfect road, smooth as a macadamized turnpike. Along its outer edge rows of thickly set rocks, several feet high, and so near each other that no carriage could possibly fall between; in the most dangerous places stout iron bars were set from rock to rock; these loops of chain ladder up the precipice were as safe as a summer pathway in a green meadow. On a stone bridge of three arches we crossed the waterfall: basins of rocks above us, filled with spray; basins and shelves and ledges of rocks below us, filled with spray; the bridge black and slippery wet, and the air thick with spray, like a snow-storm; precipices of water on the right and the left. It was next to being an eagle on wing in a storm to cross that bridge in upper air. At the sixth turn we came out abreast of the top of the waterfall, and in a moment more had left all the stress and storm and tumult of waters behind us, and glided into a sombre, still roadway beside a calm little river deep in a fir forest. Only the linnæa had won bloom out of this darkness; its courageous little tendrils wreathed the tree trunks nestled among the savage rocks, and held up myriads of pink cups wet with the ceaseless spray. It was a dreary, lonely place; miles of gaunt swamp, forest, and stony moor; here and there a farm-house, silent as if deserted.

"Where are all the people? Why do we not see any one moving about the houses?" I asked.

"In the house, reading, every one," replied Sanna. "On a Sunday afternoon, if there is no service in church, all Norwegian farm people do go into their houses, and spend all afternoon in reading and in religion."

At last we reached a more open country,—an off look to the west; new ranges of snow-topped mountains came in sight. We began to descend; another silent river slipping down by our side; two more dark, shining lakes. On the shore of one, a peasant man—the first living creature we had seen for ten miles—was taking his cart out of a little shed by the roadside. This shed was the only sign of human habitation to be seen in the region. His horse stood near by, with a big barrel slung on each side: they were barrels of milk, which had just been brought down in this way from a sæter which we could see, well up in the cloud region, far above the woods on the left. Down the steep path from this sæter the man had walked, and the horse bearing the barrels of milk had followed. Now the barrels were to be put in the cart, and carried to Eide. Ten miles more that milk was to be carried before it reached its market; and yet, at the little inn in Eide, for a breakfast, at which one may drink all the milk he desires, he will be asked to pay only thirty-five cents. What else beside milk? Fresh salmon, trout, two kinds of rye bread and two of white, good butter, six kinds of cheese, herrings done in oil and laurel leaves in tiny wooden barrels, cold sausage, ham, smoked salmon (raw), coffee and tea, and perhaps—wild strawberries: this will be the Eide summer-morning breakfast. The cheese feature in the Norwegian breakfast is startling at first: all colors, sizes, shapes, and smells known of cheese; it must be owned they are not savory for breakfast, but the Norwegian eats them almost as a rite. He has a proverb in regard to cheese as we have of fruit: "Gold in the morning, silver at noon, and lead at night;" and he lives up to it more implicitly than we do to ours.

As we neared Vossevangen, the silent river grew noisier and noisier, and at last let out all its reserves in a great torrent which leaped down into the valley with a roar. This torrent also was bridged at its leap; and the bridge seemed to be in a perpetual quiver from the shock of it. The sides of the rocky gorge below glistened black like ebony; they had been worn into columnar grooves by the centuries of whirling waters; the knotted roots of a fir forest jutted out above them, and long spikes of a beautiful white flower hung out from their crevices in masses of waving snowy bloom. It looked like a variety of the house-leek, but no human hand could reach it to make sure.