Topmast and pennon glitter free,
High raised above the greenwood tree—
As on dry land the galley moves,
By cliff and copse and alder groves.”
Lord of the Isles.
“Birger, what is the Swedish for ‘Go to the devil?’ I cannot make these little brutes of boys understand me,” shouted the Captain, who was not in the best of humours, having already made half a dozen slips on very dangerous ground. In all Sweden, there is not a more slippery bit of turf than that which clothes the cliffs and highlands of Trollhättan. The bank along which he was scrambling to get a good view of the falls rounded itself off gradually, getting more and more out of the horizontal and into the vertical at every step, till at last it plunged sheer into the foaming turn-hole of the middle fall, in which the very best of swimmers would have had no more advantage over the very worst than that of keeping his head above water till he went down the third leap, and got knocked to pieces on the rocks below. There was not a root to hold on by stronger than those of the dwarf cranberries, whose smooth leaves only aided the natural slipperiness. Heather is not common anywhere in Sweden; but here there was quite enough not only to give a purple brown hue to the scenery, but also to add to the difficulty of keeping one’s feet, in a way which any one who has walked the side of a highland hill in very dry weather will fully be able to appreciate. It was very irritating when one at last had attained a point of view—after traversing what to a leather-shod stranger was really a dangerous path—to have the current of one’s thoughts interrupted by a parcel of bare-footed urchins, who came frolicking over the very same ground, and insisting that the visitor should see everything, from the orthodox point of view set down by Murray, and from no other whatever, and moreover should pay for being tormented and unpoeticised, the regulated number of skillings.
The rush of waters was certainly very grand and very magnificent. Much has been written about it in books of travels, and much more in the album kept at the inn for the purpose of enshrining and transmitting to posterity the extasies of successive generations of travellers; but the Parson, who ought to have been lost in admiration—to his shame be it spoken—appeared chiefly solicitous to procure bait, which he and Torkel had been diligently hunting for in the shallows. It was not without considerable difficulty that a trout sufficiently small to fit the snap-hooks of the trolling-litch could be found, and when it was found, we are happy to say, it met with no more success than it deserved; for though at very considerable personal risk he tried as much of the rushing water as his longest trolling-rod would command, he was not rewarded with a single run.
But for all that, there certainly are fish in all the pools about these tremendous falls, and that he had the opportunity of satisfying himself about before he left off; for just as he was giving it up for a bad job, Torkel, who had an eye for a fish like that of a sea-eagle, caught sight of something alive that had poked itself into one of the runs from the saw-mills, a place not three feet across; and unscrewing the gaff which he was carrying, and substituting for it the five-pronged spear, he plunged it into the water and brought out a black trout (salmo ferox) of ten pounds weight at the end of it. From the nature of the water it is impossible that trout can abound at Trollhättan in any great numbers. The river has scarcely any tributaries below the falls; and as it is absolutely impossible for a fish to surmount them, the breeding ground is very limited; but, on the other hand, the clearness of the water is precisely that which best suits the constitution of a trout; bleak and gwinead, which form their principal food, are very plentiful, and from the depth of the water, there is scarcely any limit to the growth of the fish; a man, who is satisfied to catch now and then a monster, will do very well at Trollhättan, and in the course of the season will have a few stories to tell, which in England will be set down as altogether fabulous,—but it does not answer for a day’s fishing. The traveller may as well make up his mind to admire the scenery at his leisure,—it will not answer his purpose to wet a line there.
The Parson having convinced himself of this, and, moreover, having had one or two very narrow escapes, reeled up his line and contentedly sought out his friends, who, by this time, had succeeded in explaining to the swarms of guides that their services were not required, and were sitting on a heathery bank feathered with birch, exactly in front of the middle falls, comfortably eating gooseberries, which grow there in such plenty that, though the place swarms with children—a whole regiment of soldiers with their wives and families being hutted in the vicinity,—the bushes were still full of them.
“That is a curious cave,” said the Captain, pointing to a hole which seemed to enter the face of the precipitous rock by the side of the great fall, and to penetrate it for some distance; at least, the depth was sufficiently great to be lost in darkness; the bottom of it was on a level with the water, and was not accessible without a boat.