X.
From Stalheim to Eida—The Waterfall of Skjerve Fos—The Mighty Hardanger Fjord.
Odda, Norway, September 5, 1902.
We left Stalheim by Skyd (carriage), at nine o’clock. The drive was up a desolate valley, through a scattering woodland of small firs and birches, close by the side of a foaming creek, the Naerodals Elv, hundreds of becks and brooklets bounding down the mountain sides to right and left.
After an hour’s climb, we reached a flattened summit where lay a little lake, the Opheims Vand, two or three miles long and wide, encircled with snow-fields. Here and there we passed a scattered farmstead—gaard—for every bit of land yielding any grass is here in the possession of an immemorial owner. The vand is a famed trout pool, and as we wound along its shores we passed any number of men and boys trying their luck. It was raining steadily, a cold fine downpour, and all the male population seemed to have taken to the rod.
At the lake’s far end we passed a small hotel, built in Norse style with carved and ornamented gables and painted a light green. Here in the season the English come to fish.
THE NAERO DAL.
Leaving the vand, we began a long descent, and for twelve miles rolled down at a spanking pace, the brook by our side steadily growing until it at last became a huge and violent torrent, a furious river, the Tvinde Elv. In the fourteen miles we had descended—coasted—two thousand five hundred (2,500) feet, and now were come to the little town of Voss or Vossvangen, which lies on the banks of the Vangs Vand, a body of blue water five or six miles long and two miles wide, surrounded by one of the most fertile, well-cultivated valleys of Norway.
Vossvangen is a town of importance, and is the terminus of the railway with which the Norwegian government is connecting Bergen and Kristiania. The easiest parts of this national railway, those between Bergen and Vossvangen, and between Kristiania and Roikenvik—over which we came—are already constructed and running trains, but it is estimated that it will be twenty years before the connecting link is finally completed, for it is almost a continuous tunnel—a magnificent piece of railroad-making when it is done.