Bare, whitish-colored hills bound the horizon on the right; in front is a dreary waste, through which the road winds like a thread till lost in the dim haze of the distance; and to the left the everlasting snows of Snaehatten. A few wretched cabins are scattered at remote intervals over the desert plains, in which the shepherds seek shelter from the inclemency of the weather, which even in midsummer is often piercingly raw. Herds of rattle, sheep, and goats were grazing over the rocky wastes of the Fjeld. Reindeer are sometimes seen in this vicinity, but not often within sight of the road. The only vegetation produced here is reindeer moss, and a coarse sort of grass growing in bunches over the plain. I met several shepherds on the way dressed in something like a characteristic costume—frieze jackets with brass buttons, black knee-breeches, a red night-cap, and armed with the usual staff or shepherd’s crook, represented in pictures, and much discoursed of by poets:
“Methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain;”
but not on the Dovre Fjelds of Norway. It must be rather a dull business in that region, taking into consideration the barren plains, the bleak winds, and desolate aspect of the country. No sweet hawthorn bushes are there, beneath which these rustic philosophers can sit,
“Looking on their silly sheep.”
Shepherd life must be a very dismal reality indeed. And yet there is no accounting for tastes. At one point of the road, beyond Folkstuen, where a sluggish lagoon mingles its waters with the barren slopes of the Fjeld, I saw an Englishman standing up to his knees in a dismal marsh fishing for trout.
The weather was cold enough to strike a chill into one’s very marrow; yet this indefatigable sportsman had come more than a thousand miles from his native country to enjoy himself in this way. He was a genuine specimen of an English snob—self-sufficient, conceited, and unsociable; looking neither to the right nor the left, and terribly determined not to commit himself by making acquaintance with casual travelers speaking the English tongue. I stopped my cariole within a few paces and asked him “what luck?” One would think the sound of his native tongue would have been refreshing to him in this dreary wilderness; but, without deigning to raise his head, he merely answered in a gruff tone, “Don’t know, sir—don’t know!” I certainly did not suspect him of knowing much, but thought that question at least would not be beyond the limits of his intelligence. Finding him insensible to the approaches of humanity, I revenged myself for his rudeness by making a sketch of his person, which I hope will be recognized by his friends in England should he meet with any misfortune in the wilds of Norway. They will at least know where to search for his body, and be enabled to recognize it when they find it. This man’s sense of enjoyment reminded me of the anecdote told by Longfellow in Hyperion, of an Englishman who sat in a tub of cold water every morning while he ate his breakfast and read the newspapers.
PLAYING HIM OUT.
I met with many such in the course of my tour. Is it not a little marvelous what hardships people will encounter for pleasure? Here was a man of mature age, in the enjoyment perhaps of a comfortable income, who had left his country, with all its attractions, for a dreary desert in which he was utterly isolated from the world. He was not traveling—not reading, not surrounded by a few congenial friends who could make a brief exile pleasant, but utterly alone; ignorant, no doubt, of the language spoken by the few shepherds in the neighborhood; up to his knees in a pool of cold water; stubbornly striving against the most adverse circumstances of wind and weather to torture out of the water a few miserable little fish! Of what material can such a man’s brain be composed, if he be gifted with brain at all? Is it mud, clay, or water; or is it all a bog? Possibly he was a lover of nature; but if you examine his portrait you will perceive that there is nothing in his personal appearance to warrant that suspicion. Even if such were the case, this was not the charming region described by the quaint old Walton, where the scholar can turn aside “toward the high honeysuckle hedge,” or “sit and sing while the shower falls upon the teeming earth, viewing the silver streams glide silently toward their centre, the tempestuous sea,” beguiled by the harmless lambs till, with a soul possessed with content, he feels “lifted above the earth.” Nor was the solitary angler of the Dovre Fjeld a man likely to be lifted from the earth by any thing so fragile as the beauties of nature. His weight—sixteen stone at least—would be much more likely to sink him into it.