Azaziel Link.
THE FIORD
CHAPTER I
The Fiord
How well I remember it! The solemn, beautiful fiord, framed within the pine tressed walls, flecked with patches of sunlight, where its waters glistened with beryl hues. Shaded in the recesses of the cliffs where the lustreless flood softly murmured with the faintest rhythmic cadence against the rocky rims, immobile and caressed as they had been for hundreds of thousands of years, and in a few places yielding slowly to decay in shingled beaches. And the music of nature united with the appeal to the eyes of color and form, to entrance the visitor.
A rushing brook singing like a girl hurrying to some holiday joy, broke from the highlands, a silvery thread, then a braid of pearls, then a sloping cataract of splintered and rainbowed waves, then in silence for a while, catching its breath, as the girl might catch it, for a new descent, and then the renewed song, through a tiny gorge, its jubilation softened to a murmur, and then the flash and chorus of its outspread ripples as it leaped into the fiord. And that was the light soprano of the music around us, and under it rolled the bass notes, muted and sfuggendo, of the distant waterfall—foss—at the inland head of the fiord, and towards which were even then starting the pleasure boats, launches and steam yachts of the tourists.
The sense of smell contributed its intoxication to the charmed surrender of eye and ear, for there was flung down from the tree-crowned cliffs the scent of wild flowers and the clean, resinous odors of the spruce. The wind singing, too, like a chord accompaniment to the cheerful ballad of the brook, and the heavy recitative of the waterfall, brought this fragrance to us, even as it swept in capricious rushes outward over the fiord to its gateway, through which the distant sea lay motionless like a blazoned shield, beyond the Skargaard.
A shelf of land, dropping off in a slope to the waters of the fiord and pierced by a roadway whose climbing curves led at last to the summit of the cliffs, and which ended on the shore in a dock, then gay with the summer glories of young girls and men, held the picturesque red houses of a few farmers, and the wandering walls of the comfortable hotel. The brilliant green of the cut lawn, like an enameled sheath, covered the little tableland, and venturesome tongues and ribbons ran flame-wise up crannies, ledges and narrow glades, to be lost in the shadows of the firs and the sprayed and silken birches high above.