Early next morning we left our good hotel and hastened to the steamer which awaited us upon the fjord. "What, precisely, is a fjord?" some may inquire. In briefest terms, it is a mountain gorge connected with the ocean, a narrow arm of the sea extending inland, sometimes for one hundred miles. Moreover, to carry out the simile, at the extremity of every such long arm are "fingers;" that is, still narrower extensions, which wind about the bases of the mountains till they seem like glittering serpents lying in the shadow of tremendous cliffs.
A FJORD.
Thus in one sense, here at Laerdalsören, we had reached the sea, but in another, it was still eighty-five miles away. Yet we were now to embark on a large ocean steamer, lying but a few yards from the shore, for these mysterious fjords are sometimes quite as deep as the mountains over them are high. They open thus the very heart of Norway to the commerce of the world. And as our steamer glided from one mountain-girdled basin into another, I realized why this western coast of Norway is one of the most remarkable land-formations on the globe. If we were able to look down upon it from an elevation, we should perceive that from the mountain chain, which forms, as it were, the backbone of the country, a multitude of grooves stretch downward to the shore between the elevations, like spaces between the teeth of a comb. Into these mountain crevices, formed in the misty ages of the past, the sea now makes its way, continually growing narrower, until at last it winds between frowning cliffs of fearful height, down which stream numerous waterfalls, the spray from which at times sweeps over the steamer as it glides along. Traveling, therefore, on these ocean avenues is like sailing through Switzerland.
AN ARM OF THE SEA.
SAILING THROUGH SWITZERLAND.
Delighted beyond measure with this new experience, some two or three hours after leaving Laerdalsören, we gradually approached the most sublime of all these ocean highways,—the Naerofjord. No general view can possibly portray its grandeur. The only way to appreciate the vastness of its well-nigh perpendicular cliffs is to compare them with some objects on the banks. In many places, for example, cattle grazing on the shore, compared with their giant environment, seemed like mice, and a church steeple appeared no larger than a pine-cone.