"Gracious heavens!" I exclaimed, smarting with pain; "why don't you remain in bed, instead of stalking up and down the room all night long?"
"Go and remain there yourself," retorted R——, in no happy frame of mind. "I won't be eaten up by bugs and all kinds of beastliness, for any one."
"Yes; but you can keep your nails to yourself," I replied; and having great faith in the power of friction, commenced rubbing my ear.
The silentness of death succeeded, interrupted only by the long, loud breathing of P——, and the low, melancholy howl of wolves in the mountains.
With regrets and earnest protestations never to leave the yacht again, R—— and I wore the night away. P—— remained impregnable to the attacks of bugs, fleas, and mosquitoes; and while he told us, in a sonorous language of his own, how profoundly he slept, he sometimes gave mechanical signs of feeling by scratching obstreperously his legs and arms, and slapping himself smartly on the face.
Early the subsequent morning we took leave of our host, and regardless of the intense heat, made the best of our way towards Fædde. The peasantry along the road we travelled appeared to descend in wretchedness the farther we advanced; and nothing could exceed the poverty exhibited in the outward appearance of their hovels. At every station where we stopped, misery, by exterior marks, stood dominant; and one post-house, the last before we arrived at Fædde, was divested of every comfort, and looked more dreary than all the others we had seen. The whole family were partaking of their scanty meal spread on a deal table, yet smooth as marble, and brilliant as a polished sword. Surrounded by a gang of children, some grown to maturity, men and women, and others only infants, the poor patriarch sat pale and sickly at the family board; and the melancholy shade that kept flitting over his countenance, though he smiled and rose to greet us, told of some blight that had fallen on his hopes; for he resumed his seat apart, and crossing his thin hands on his lap, gave no other notice of his presence than an occasional sigh, uttered deeply and involuntarily. Except the old man, they all eat fast and greedily of a kind of white mixture, or porridge, collected in a large wooden basin.
Leaving this place, we pursued our journey through a country intersected by rugged mountains, whose summits, denuded of all verdure, rose high and imposingly to Heaven, but their bases were clothed with the cheerful birch, the fir and pine, and here and there, a little knoll of grass shining, like an emerald, amid this wilderness of rock. Herds of cattle, interspersed with goats and sheep, hung over the edges of the precipices, browsing on the tufts of green food that sprouted from the jagged crags. The road wound through narrow mountain-passes, nearly choked up with huge fragments of rock, the parent mountains on either hand rising perpendicularly to an enormous height; and where a ravine yawned, as if to cheer the heart and eye saddened and wearied by the desolate monotony of stony fell and inhospitable hill, a forest of firs would creep, sloping, to their very summits. Far above our heads, only the fleecy clouds breaking into a variety of forms as they moved slowly along the mountain sides, and the raven's hoarse cry, or the shrill scream of the eagle, broke the prevailing solitude of scene and sound.
Many of the peasants whom we encountered on the way, wore red caps and short jackets scarcely descending below their arm-pits, covered elaborately with small conical silver buttons; and while some of them concluded their attire with breeches extending to the knees and there clasped with buckles, others, more fantastic in taste, preferred the loose trowsers of the Ottoman. Hair, prodigiously long, flowing slovenly over the shoulders, was common to all. Hats were worn, but they may be exceptions. A blue petticoat, blue as their beautiful sky, and a jacket bound by a scarlet sash around the waist, and a coloured silk kerchief wreathed about the head, its two ends projecting, like the wings of Mercury's cap, behind each ear, appeared to constitute the ordinary costume of the Norwegian peasant women.
On the morning of the fifth day since we had left the Gron Fiord, driving up a steep and winding road we reached the top of a magnificent range of mountains, and glancing over an intervening forest covered with every variety of shade, that fir, pine, birch, and grassy glades could afford, the eye rested on the village of Fædde, with its forty houses and single wooden church, bosomed in a luxuriant, green valley, on the opposite shore of the Fiord. A thousand feet beneath, on the blue water, floated the yacht with flapping canvass, and bearing all the appearance of having outstripped us in the journey only by a very few minutes. The picturesque beauty of the Fiord was increased by being distinctly seen from a commanding site, and the bold outlines of its frowning headlands jutted one beyond the other nearly into the centre of the Fiord, till they were mingled in colour with the distant ocean, of which a glimpse could just be caught. The sea gulls frequenting this Fiord, flew around us and screeched amid the universal silence which was broken by the roar of waterfalls, concealed from sight by the dark forest, but the sparkling stream, bursting at times upon the view, would flow a little way in the broad daylight, then steal as suddenly again from observation in its circuitous course.
An immense pram, larger than the launch of a frigate, and rowed by two natives, bore us sluggishly to the cutter.