"'Bout!" shouted the pilot, cutting D—— off in his reply.
"'Bout!" echoed the helmsman.
"Put the helm hard up," continued the pilot excitedly, in a louder voice; "she mustn't shoot."
"Ay, ay, sir," again replied the helmsman, and in obedience to the reply the cutter spun round, like a top. The noise of the sails and blocks, while the vessel was in stays, roused the fishermen, their wives, and children, who dwelt in the two cottages to which I have cursorily alluded, and they gathered about the doors to look on. I heard those hardy fishermen make some observation, for at intervals, we were not many yards from their houses, either in derision of the cutter being imagined competent to work through the channel, or in laudation of the seaman-like skill with which she was managed. They called aloud each to the other across the water, and spoke in praise or admiration; but being in a dialect of the Norwegian language I could not tell what they said, and how they thought. We had made a fair reach, and it was no longer audacity to hope, that, the cutter was a match for the current. To get a better view of the feat, some of the Dutchmen and Norwegians had mounted the shrouds of their vessels, and appeared to take as much interest in the trial as we did.
"'Bout!" a second time exclaimed the pilot, and turning towards the helmsman, made a rotary motion with his hand to bring the cutter right round at once.
"'Bout!" reiterated the helmsman, and lashed the tiller close up under the weather quarter bulwarks. With equal adroitness, as at first, the sails were let go and drawn aft, and our gallant vessel appeared not to feel the resistance of the rapid tide. The wind, although foul as any wind could be, blew steadily as any wind could blow, and the Iris, under its favour, reluctantly though it seemed given, was in another and third tack again in still water. The Dutch and Norwegian crews could not resist expressing their admiration; and flourishing their caps over their heads while standing in their rigging, they gave us three rounds of lusty cheers. The soaring, sombre mountains took up the echoes, and returned not cheer for cheer, but bellowed a ten-fold multiplication of huzzas.
Since we had taken leave, we had seen no vessel to remind us of England; and although, wherever we went, the natives would tell us some of our countrymen were in the immediate neighbourhood, we never had the good fortune to fall in with them. We had received no tidings, good or bad, from home; and Europe, as far as we knew, might be in revolutionary confusion: at Bergen, however, we hoped that letters were awaiting our arrival.
Saturday the 17th of July, at midnight, we brought up off Bergen. It was too late to pay much attention to any object; and after a careless view of the town from deck, I went to bed.
The position of Bergen is similar to that of most of the other Norwegian towns I had seen, girt on three sides with lofty, rocky mountains; and on the fourth side by the blue waters of the Fiord. I looked on Bergen with the liveliest interest, because its name was familiar to me when a child, and I used to lisp the word before I could walk steadily; for in those young days of waywardness my old schoolmistress, whose peaked nose and malicious heart are still a vivid truth, would threaten to give me to the fishermen at Bergen who, she said, would take and toss me into the Maelstrom. With an eagerness akin to that of a schoolboy at Christmas, gazing on the green curtain of a theatre, the moment it is rising to disclose its wondrous entertainments, did I, travelling headlong in memory from childhood to manhood and stumbling over a batch of ancient feelings, stand looking, with strained eyes, on the white-washed, quaint-fashioned Bergen, balancing the vicissitudes of life and conjecturing what the chances might be, I should not, by some agency as unaccountable as that which had brought me hither, be looking in three months' time on the Golden shore of the Bight of Biaffir.
South-east of Bergen, twenty miles from the deck on which I stand, blazing with dazzling splendour in the mid-day sun, the glaciers of Folgefonde fall upon my sight; and raising its summit six thousand feet to heaven, the stupendous range of mountain with its field of ice, forty miles in length and twenty in breadth, braves with eternal snow the tropic fury of this northern noon.