Expand the proportions of this amphitheatre, soar up to the clouds, lose yourself in the caves of the rocks where the walruses hide, still your fancy will never be equal to the riches, the poetry of this Norwegian scene. For can your thought ever be as vast as the ocean that bounds the land, as fantastic as the strange forms assumed by the forests, as the clouds, the shadows, the changes of light?
Do you see now, above the meadows on the shore, on the furthest fold of the plain that undulates at the foot of the high hills of Jarvis, two or three hundred houses, roofed with nœver, a kind of thatch of birch bark; frail-looking dwellings, quite low, and suggesting silkworms flung there on a mulberry leaf brought by the wind? Above these humble and peaceful dwellings is a church, built with a simplicity that harmonizes with the poverty of the village. A graveyard lies round the chancel of this church; the parsonage is seen beyond. A little higher, on a knoll of the hillside, stands a dwelling, the only one built of stone, and for that reason called by the natives the Castle—the Swedish Castle.
In fact, a rich man had come from Sweden thirty years before this story opens and settled at Jarvis, trying to improve its fortunes. This little mansion, erected with a view to tempting the inhabitants to build the like, was remarkable for its substantial character, for a garden wall—a rare thing in Norway, where, in spite of the abundance of stone, wood is used for all the fences, even for those that divide the fields. The house, thus protected from snow, stood on a mound in the midst of a vast courtyard. The windows were screened by those verandas of immense depth supported on large squared fir-trunks, which give Northern buildings a sort of patriarchal expression.
From under their shelter the savage bareness of the Falberg could easily be seen, and the infinitude of the open ocean be compared with the drop of water in the foam-flecked gulf; the portentous rush of the Sieg could be heard, though from afar the sheet of water looked motionless, where it threw itself into its granite bowl hedged in for three leagues round with vast glaciers—in short, the whole landscape where the scene is laid of the supernatural but simple events of this narrative.
The winter of 1799-1800 was one of the hardest in the memory of Europe; the Norway sea froze in every fiord, where the violence of the undertow commonly prevents the ice from forming. A wind, in its effects resembling the Spanish desert wind, had swept the ice of the Stromfiord by drifting the snow to the head of the gulf. It was long since the good folks of Jarvis had seen the vast mirror of the pool in winter reflecting the sky—a curious effect here in the heart of the hills whose curves were effaced under successive layers of snow, the sharpest peaks, like the deepest hollows, forming mere faint undulations under the immense sheet thrown by nature over the landscape now so dolefully dazzling and monotonous. The long hangings of the Sieg, suddenly frozen, described a vast arch, behind which the traveler might have walked sheltered from the storm if any one had been bold enough to venture across country. But the dangers of any expedition kept the boldest hunters within doors, fearing that they might fail to discern under the snow the narrow paths traced along the edge of the precipices, the ravines, and the cliffs. Not a creature gave life to this white desert reigned over by the Polar blast, whose voice alone was sometimes though rarely heard.
The sky, always gray, gave the pool a hue of tarnished steel. Now and again an eider-duck might fly across with impunity, thanks to the thick down that shelters the dreams of the wealthy, who little know the dangers that purchase it; but the bird—like the solitary Bedouin who traverses the sands of Africa—was neither seen nor heard; in the torpid air, bereft of electric resonance, the rush of its wings was noiseless, its joyous cry unheard. What living eye could endure the sparkle of that precipice hung with glittering icicles, and the hard reflections from the snows, scarcely tinted on the peaks by the beams of the pallid sun which peeped out now and then like a dying thing anxious to prove that it still lives? Many a time, when the rack of gray clouds, driven in squadrons over the mountains and pine forests, hid the sky with their dense shroud, the earth, for lack of heavenly lights, had an illumination of its own.
Here, then, were met all the majestic attributes of the eternal cold that reigns at the Pole, of which the most striking is such royal silence as absolute monarchs dwell in. Every condition carried to excess has the appearance of negation, or the stamp of apparent death; is not life the conflict of two forces? Here nothing showed a sign of life. One force alone, the barren force of frost, reigned supreme. The beating of the open sea even did not penetrate to this silent hollow, so full of sound during the three brief months when nature hurriedly produces the uncertain harvest needful to support this patient race. A few tall fir-trees protruded their dark pyramids loaded with festoons of snow; and the droop of their boughs, bending under these heavy beards, gave a finishing touch to the mourning aspect of the heights, where they were seen as black points.
Every family clung to the fireside in a house carefully closed, with a store of biscuit, run butter, dried fish, and provisions laid in to stand seven months of winter. Even the smoke of these dwellings was scarcely visible; they were all nearly buried in snow, of which the weight was broken by long planks starting from the roof, and supported at some distance from the walls on strong posts, thus forming a covered way round the house. During these dreadful winters the women weave and dye the stuffs of wool or linen of which the clothes are made; while the men for the most part read, or else lose themselves in those prodigious meditations which have given birth to the grand theories, the mystical dreams of the North, its beliefs and its studies—so thorough on certain points of science that they have probed to the core; a semi-monastic mode of life, which forces the soul back on itself, to feed on itself, and which makes the Norwegian peasant a being apart in the nations of Europe.
This, then, was the state of things on the Stromfiord in the first year of the nineteenth century, about the middle of the month of May.
One morning, when the sun was blazing down into the heart of this landscape, lighting up the flashes of the ephemeral diamonds produced by the crystallized surface of the snow and ice, two persons crossed the gulf and flew along the shelves of the Falberg, mounting towards the summit from ledge to ledge. Were they two human beings, or were they arrows? Any one who should have seen them would have taken them for two eiders soaring with one consent below the clouds. Not the most superstitious fisherman, not the most daring hunter, would have supposed that human creatures could have the power of pursuing a path along the faint lines traced on the granite sides, where this pair were, nevertheless, gliding along with the appalling skill of somnambulists, when, utterly unconscious of the laws of gravity and the perils of the least false step, they run along a roof, preserving their balance under the influence of an unknown power.