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IX
A Day Upon the Sogne Fjord
Stalheim Hotel, Norway, September 4, 1902.
To-day we have spent mostly on the water. We left Laerdalsoeren – the mouth of the valley of the river Laera – by ship, a tiny ship, deep-hulled and built to brave the fiercest gales, a boat of eighty to one hundred tons. Casting off from the little pier at eight o’clock, we were upon the waters of the majestic Sogne Fjord until after 3 p. m. This great fjord is the first body of water that I have seen which to my mind is really a fjord, the others along the shores of which we have journeyed for the past three days, including the last and least, the Smidal and the Bruce Fjords, were only mountain tarns, what in Norse speech is termed a “Vand.” While I had read much of fjords, never till to-day have I comprehended their marvelous grandeur, the overwhelming magnitude of the earth’s convulsions which eons ago cracked open their tremendous depths and heights. Although their bottoms lie deeper than the bottom of the sea, (4,000 feet deep in some places), so the Captain tells me, yet up out of these profound waters rise the gigantic mountains (fjeld) five and six thousand feet into the blue sky, straight up as it were, with hundreds of cascades and foaming waterfalls, sometimes the tempestuous tides of veritable rivers, leaping down the black rocks and splashing into space, and everywhere above them all are the snow-fields, the eternal snow-fields.
Sometimes when the precipices are sheltered and sun-warmed, their surface is green with mosses and banded with yellow gorse, and with white and pink and purple heather, and barred with scarlet and gray lichens. The waters were so deep, the precipices so sheer that often our ship sailed not more than twenty or thirty feet distant from them; the misty spray of the streams dissolving into impalpable dust hundreds of feet above us, dampening us like rain, or windblown, flying away in clouds of vaporous smoke.
Here and there along the more open parts of the fjord were bits of green slope with snug farmsteads, a fishing boat swinging to a tiny pier or tied to the very house itself. Sometimes, perched on a rocky shelf, grass-grown and high-up a thousand feet, we would discern a clinging cabin, and once we espied a grazing cow that seemed to be hanging in mid air. No patch of land lay anywhere about that was not dwelt upon, tilled or grazed by some man or beast. The climate of western Norway is mild and humid, tempered as it is by the Gulf Stream. These coasts have always been well peopled, sea and soil yielding abundant living to the hardy Norsk. The fjords are the public highways and upon their icefree waters vigorous little steamships ply back and forth busied with incessant traffic through all the year. Our course led us up many winding arms and watery lanes to cozy hamlets nestled at the mouth of some verdant dal, where we would lie-to a few minutes to put off and take on passengers and freight. We also carried the mails. At each stopping-place the ship’s mate would hand out the bags to the waiting official, often an old man, more generally a rosy-cheeked young woman, and carefully take a written memorandum of receipt, when bag and maiden and many of the waiting crowd would disappear. Once or twice the bags were loaded upon one of the curious two-wheeled carts called stolkjaerres driven by a husky boy, when cart and horse and boy at once set off at lively gallop. In winter time sledges and men on skjis replace the handy stolkjaerre, and thus all through the year are the mails efficiently distributed. The captain tells me that a great proportion of the letters received and sent are from and to America, where so many of Norway’s most energetic and capable young men are growing rich, and that a large proportion of these letters received are registered, and contain cash or money orders remitted to the families at home. What wonder is it that these thousand white-winged missives, which continually cross the sea, have made and are now making the ancient Kingdom almost a Democratic state! At one of these hamlets, Aurland by name, I caught with my camera a pretty Norwegian lass in full native costume, such as has been worn from time immemorial by the women of the Sogne Fjord, – a charming picture.
Toward three o’clock we sailed up a shadowy canyon, the Naeroe Fjord, under mighty overhanging precipices, arriving at Gudvangen, our voyage’s end. Here carriages awaited us and here Ole Mon, who has sailed with us throughout the day, after having driven us down to the boat himself and refused all pay, handed us over to the driver of the best vogn (wagon) of the lot, with evidently very particular instructions as to our welfare. In fact, H tells me, Ole Mon has spent the day with his book of recommendation open in his hand, calling the world’s attention to my glowing rhymes, and pointing me out with an air of profound deference as an illustrious, although to him unknown, bard. We bid him farvel, with real sorrow, and regretted that he might not have driven us to the very end.
We now went on ten kilometers through a narrow clove, between enormous heights, passing the Jordalsnut, towering above us, straight up more than three thousand feet, and straining our necks to peer up at the foaming torrent of the Kilefos leaping two thousand feet seemingly at a single bound, and almost wetting us with its flying spray. At one place the road is diverted, and the immense mountain is scarred from the very edge of the snows by the marring rifts of a recent avalanche, which, our driver says, was the most tremendous fall of snow and ice these parts have ever known. At last we began a steep zigzag ascent, so sharp that even H relieved the ponies of her weight. We were an hour in climbing the twelve hundred feet; and found ourselves on a wide bench overlooking the wild and lovely Naeroedal up which we had come. The sun was behind us, the half shadows of approaching twilight were creeping out from each dell and crevice. Upon our left, the gray peak of the Jordalsnut yet caught the sunshine, as also did the snow-fields of the Kaldafjeld, almost as lofty upon our right. The Naeroedal was filling with the mysterious haziness of the northern eventime. Behind us, commanding this exquisite vista, we found a monstrous and uncouth edifice, a German enterprise, the Stalheim Hotel, thrust out upon a rocky platform between two rivers plunging down on either side. Here we have been given a modern bedroom, fitted with American-looking oak furniture, have enjoyed a well-cooked German supper, sat by a blazing wood fire, and shall soon turn off the electric lights and turn in, to repose on a wire mattress, and be lulled to sleep by the musical roar of the two great waterfalls.
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.
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.
Vossvangen is also the birthplace of one of Minnesota’s most illustrious sons, United States Senator Knute Nelson. It is upon these mountains that he tended the goats and cows when a barefooted urchin, and I do not doubt that he has surreptitiously pulled many a fine trout and salmon out of the lovely lake. The people of Vossvangen accept his honors as partly[Pg 81][Pg 82] their own, and my Norwegian host gazed at me most complacently when I told him that American Senators held in their hands more power and were bigger men than any Swedish King. Norwegians are justly proud of their eminent sons who, in the great Republic over the sea, are so splendidly demonstrating the capability of the Norse race.
We put up at a modern-looking inn, called Fleischer’s Hotel, a favorite rendezvous for the English, despite its German-sounding name. Here we rested a couple of hours, and were given a well-served dinner with tender mutton and baked potatoes, big and mealy, which we ate with a little salt and abundance of delicious cream. Our hearts were here stirred with sympathy for a most unhappy-looking American girl who had evidently married a foreign husband. He was a surly, ugly-mannered man, with low brows and tangled black hair. She, poor thing, was the picture of despair, her fate being that all too common one of the American woman who, foolishly dazzled with a titled lover, too late finds him to be a titled brute.
We were to continue to Eida on the Hardanger Fjord, in the same carriage in which we set out. The ponies were well rested, and we got away a little after two o’clock. Ascending the well-tilled valley of the Rundals Elv by easy grades over a fine hard road, we crossed a marshy divide and then descended to the Hardanger Fjord. After passing the divide and coming down a few miles, we suddenly found ourselves on the rim of a vast amphitheatre into the center of which plunged a mighty waterfall, the Skjervefos, much resembling that of the Kaaterskill Falls, in the Catskill mountains of New York, only ten times as big. A roaring river here jumps sheer a thousand feet, and then again five hundred more. Yet we did not know of it until we were right on to it and into it. The falls making two great leaps, the road crosses the wild white waters between them on a wooden bridge. Over this we drove through soaking clouds of spray.
When in London we had no thought of Norway. Not until we heard from General and Mrs. C of the delights of this journey did we make up our minds to take it. We were then in Copenhagen, and neither in that town nor in Kristiania have we been able to get hold of an English-worded guide book. We are trusting to our driver’s knowledge, and to our own eyes and wits. And so it is, that we came right upon one of the most splendid waterfalls in all Norway, and never knew aught of it until chasm and flood opened at our feet. Perhaps it is better so. We have no expectations, our eyes are perpetually strained for the next turn in the road, our ears are alert for the thundering of cascades, our minds are open for astonishment and delight.
While it is a substantial modern bridge that now takes you safely over the stream which spins and spumes between the upper and the nether falls, yet our driver tells us, that in the ancient days when men and beasts must ford or swim to get across, this was dreaded as a most dangerous place. Few dared to ford, – most made a long detour. No matter how quiet or how low the waters might appear, there were yet dangers which men could not see, for water-demons hid in the black eddies and skulked in the foam. They lurked in silence until the traveler was midway the stream when they would boldly seize him by the feet, and draw him down, and ride his body exultingly through the plunging cataract below, nor did they fear also to drown what rescuer might venture in to save his friend. When now the moon is low and the night is still, may frequently be heard commingling with the leaping waters’ roar, ’tis said, the death wails of the lost souls of those whom the demons thus have drowned and delivered for torment to the cruel master-demon, Niki.
Below the giant Skjervefos we rolled alongside its Elv until we came out upon the margin of another exquisite tarn, the Gravens Vand, where, just as along the Vangsmjoesen Vand, the roadway is, much of it, hewn out in galleries at the base of overhanging cliffs. Nor is there room for carriages to pass. There are turnouts, here and there, and you pull a rope and ring a bell which warns ahead that you are coming. In some places the roadway was shored up with timbers above the profound black waters. We passed from the vand through a rocky glen down which the foaming waters hurried to the sea. We followed the stream and suddenly came out into vast breadth and distance. We were at Eida on an arm of the mighty Hardanger Fjord, the biggest earth crack in Norway.
A fresh, keen wind blew up from the ocean. A wooden pier jutted out into the deep water, where, tied to it, were several fishing smacks. A small, black-hulled steamer was there taking on freight, but it was not our boat. The sky was overcast. The long twilight was coming to an end. It would soon be dark. Across the fjord, giant black-faced precipices lifted up into the clouds and snows. Down the fjord misty headlands loomed against the dusk. The black waters were foam capped. There was a dull moan to the wind in the offing; it was a night for a storm at sea. It now grew dark. A few fitful stars shone here and there. The wind was rising. A bright light suddenly appeared toward the west. Our boat had come round the headland, and was soon at the pier. It was much like the little ship in which we sailed upon the Sogne Fjord. These fjords are alive with multitudes of just such boats, deep-set, sturdy craft, built to brave all weathers and all seas. Our course lay down the Graven Fjord, through the Uten Fjord, and then up the long, narrow Soer Fjord – arms of the Hardanger – to the hamlet of Odda, where we would again take a carriage and cross the snow-fields of the giant Haukeli mountains of the Western Alps.
Watching the sullen waters, profound and mysterious, as they churned into a white wake behind our little craft, I could scarcely credit it that I was upon the Hardanger Fjord, the greatest and most intricate of the sheltered harbors which for centuries have made the coasts of Norway the fisherman’s haven, the pirate’s home. Upon these waters the ancient Viking learned his amphibious trade. Hid in the coves which nestle everywhere along the bases of the precipices the Viking mothers hatched and reared their broods of sea-urchins, who romped with the seals and chased the mermaids and frolicked with the storms. Where I now sailed had met together again and again those fleets of war-boats, the like of which we saw the other day in Kristiania, and which went out to plunder and ravage hamlet and town and city along all the ocean coasts, even passing through the Gates of Hercules, and visiting Latin and Greek and African province with devastation and death. “Sea-wolves,” Tacitus called them, and such they were. Here gathered the hardy war-men who went out and conquered Gaul, and founded Norse rule in Normanwise where now is Normandy. Hence sailed forth the warships which harried the British Isles, and left Norse speech strong to this day on Scottish tongue and in Northumbrian mouth. Here, also, fitted out the ships, some of the crews of which it may have been who left their marks upon the New Jersey shores in Vineland, and who may even have been the sires of that strange blue-eyed, light-haired, unconquered race I saw two years ago in Yucatan, who have held the Spaniards these four centuries in check. I gazed upon the black waters of mighty Hardanger, and saw the fleets returning with their spoil, and heard the shouts of vengeance wreaked and victory won, which have so often echoed among these mountains. I was looking upon the breeding, homing waters of the greatest sea-race the world has known, and every lapping wavelet became instinct with the mystery of the cruel, splendid past.
The churning of the propeller blades now ceased. I felt a jarring of the boat. We were come to Odda and the voyage’s end.
It was ten o’clock when we made our port. A black night it had been, pitch dark, with a fierce wind and ill-tempered sea. The profound waters respond with sullen restlessness to the stress of outer tempest. Only a Norseman born and bred to these tortuous channels could have safely navigated them on such a night, and I noticed that our engines did not once slacken speed throughout the voyage!
Upon arriving at our hotel we found we were expected. A comfortable room was in readiness, and a carriage engaged for the following day and early breakfast arranged. All this had been done through telephone by our Tourists’ Agency (the Bennetts) in Kristiania. And so have we found it everywhere along our route. All Norway, every post office and nearly every farm, and especially all hotels and inns, are connected by a telephone system owned and run by the Government. Anybody in Norway can call up and talk to anybody else. We have experienced the full benefit of this efficiency.
Our entire trip has been arranged by telephone from Kristiania. We are always expected. A delicious meal, ordered from Kristiania, is always ready for us, and every landlord knows to the minute just when we will arrive, for news of us has been ’phoned ahead from the last station we have passed.
This hamlet of Odda is an important point. Here converge the two great trade and tourist routes of Western Norway. The one, the Telemarken route, crossing the Haukeli Fjeld of the Western Alps to Dalen, and thence by the Telemarken lakes and locks to Skien, and by rail to Kristiania; the other diverging at Horre, passing down the valley of the Roldals Vand to Sand and thence to Staavanger by the sea, whence ships cross to Hamburg and Bremen and the North Sea ports, and to Hull and Harwich in Britain – favorite routes by which the Germans and British enter Norway.
XI
The Buarbrae and Folgefonden Glaciers – Cataracts and Mountain Tarns – Odda to Horre
Horre, Hotel Breifond, September 6, 1902.
To-day we have driven thirty miles from Odda, all of it up hill, except the last six miles. We started about nine o’clock with two horses, an easy carriage, and a driver whom I have had to resign to H’s more promising Danish, for he is elderly and very weak in the foreign tongue. From the first we began to climb. The driver in Norway always walks up the hills, and the male traveler also walks, while the female traveler is expected to walk, if she be able. The Norse ponies take their time, although at the end of the day they have traveled many miles and are seemingly little tired.
By the side of the smooth road rushed a river, the Aabo Elv, a mass of foam and spray which sometimes flew over us. A couple of miles farther on we came to a little dark-blue lake, the Sandven Vand, surrounded by lofty mountains, on the far side of which, almost jutting into it, pressed down the glacier of Buarbrae, descending from the snow-fields of the Folgefonden, a single expanse of ice and snow some forty miles long and ten to twenty wide, the greatest accumulation of snow and ice in western Norway. Over the precipices hemming in the vand dashed scores of cataracts and cascades, often leaping two and three thousand feet in sudden plunge. H says nobody can ever show her a waterfall again, nor talk about English Waters or Scottish Lochs.
Passing the lake, we continued to ascend, the road entering a deep and sombre gorge, which suddenly widened out into a sunlit vale, the air being filled with mists and rainbows. We were nearing the Lotefos and the Skarsfos, two of Norway’s most celebrated cataracts. Two rivers begin falling almost a mile apart, approaching as they fall, until they unite in a final leap of nearly fifteen hundred feet, a splendid spectacle, while right opposite to them tumbles the Espelandsfos, falling from similar heights. The spray and mist of the three commingle in a common cloud, and the highway passes through the eternal shower bath. As you look up you can see the entire mass of the waters from their first spring into space throughout their tumultuous, furious descent, until they eddy at your feet. Nature is so lavish here with her gigantic earth and water masses that one is perpetually awe-struck.
One incident has occurred today, which I presume I may take as a high compliment to my native tongue. One of two young Frenchmen, whose carriage has traveled near our own, while walking ahead of his vehicle, found the ponies disposed to walk him down. Twice this happened. Then he waxed wroth. He suspected the tow-headed Norse driver of not being really asleep, but of trying to even up the ancient national grudge against his own dear France. He flew into a Gallic passion. He stopped short. He halted the team. He awoke the driver. He shouted in broken English, “You drive me down! You drive me down! You vone scoundrel! I say vone damn to you, I say vone damn, I say vone damn!” – shaking his fist in the astonished face of the sleepy-head. After that the Norseman kept awake and the French gentleman walked safely in the middle of the road. He evidently felt that to swear in French would be quite lost upon the son of the Vikings. English alone would do the job.
We climbed for many miles a deep glen called the Seljestad Juvet; and dined long past the hour of noon at a wayside inn, the Seljestad Hotel. The hotel was kept by women. “Our men,” they said, “are gathering hay at the Saeter (mountain farm) far up on the mountain highlands. They are gone for a month, and will not return until the crop is all got in.” We paid our modest reckoning to a delicate, fair-haired, blue-eyed little woman, with quiet, graceful manners, well bred and courteous in bearing. She is the bookkeeper and business manager of the inn, “so long as the summer season lasts,” she said. And then she sails to England in one of her father’s ships, and there becomes a governess in an English family until another summer holiday shall come around. She had never been to America. “Some day,” her skipper sire had “promised to take her to New York,” when they would “run over for a day” to Minneapolis to see an aunt and cousins who were prospering, as do all Norwegians in America’s opportunity-affording air. And “Americans, she always liked to meet,” she said, “for unlike the English, they met you so frankly and did not condescend.” She showed H all through the neat and tidy kitchen, while a big black nanny goat stood in the doorway and watched them both.
All the afternoon we kept on climbing by the winding roadway, passing a black-watered, snow-fed tarn, the Gors Vand, and over the Gorssvingane pass above the snow line, where snow-fields stretched below us, around us, above us. From the summit of 3,392 feet above Odda and the sea, we had a superb view of all the vast Folgefond ice-field behind us, and before us two others, the Breifond and the Haukeli Fjeld, as vast, while 2,000 feet right down beneath us lay a deep blue lake, the Roldals Vand.
The road now wound ten kilometers (six and one-third miles) down into the deep valley by many successive loops, twelve of them, one-half a mile to the loop – a feat of fine engineering, for this is a military road. We came down on a full trot all the way, even as Ole Mon came down the Laera Dal, until we reined in at a picturesque inn at the vale of Horre, overlooking the valley of Roldal and its vand. Now we are in a cozy hostelry, the Hotel Breifond, with a room looking out over the exquisite deep-blue lake, encompassed by green mountains and snow-covered summits.
Our hotel is kept by two sweet-faced elderly women, serene and rosy-cheeked, dressed in black with immaculate white caps; one is the widow of a daring seaman who years ago went down with his ship in a winter gale. He was the captain and would not leave his post, though many of the crew deserted and were saved. The other is her spinster sister, whose betrothed lover likewise was lost at sea. In the summer time they here harbor many anglers, who come to fish the waters of the Roldals Vand and adjacent streams, which like most Norwegian lakes and rivers are rented out by the local provincial or district governments. The visitors who come here are chiefly English, the ladies tell us, and great is their distress and often violent their objurgation at the absence of any darkness when they may sleep. They cannot adjust themselves to the nightless days. They are inexpressibly shocked when they find themselves playing a game of golf or tennis at midnight, or forgetful of the flight of time in the excitement of a salmon chase, pausing to eat a midday snack at 2 a. m.
Our beds are the softest we have yet slept in, for both mattress and coverlet are of eider down. The two ladies have been delighted to talk with H in the native tongue, and have told her of their nephews and cousins who are getting rich owning fine wheat farms in the Red River of the North. “Come back to us in June,” they say. “Our wild flowers are then in bloom, and the hungry trout and salmon will then rise to any fly!” And H and I resolve that in June we surely will return.
I saw one or two small pale butterflies to-day, and one gray moth at the snow edge, where we crossed the divide; the only ones I yet have seen. The birds, in this northland, of course, are all new to me; the crows are gray, with black wings, heads and tails; a magpie with white shoulders and white on head, and long, blue-black tail, is very tame; while a bird I take to be a jay is numerous, with black body, white shoulders and wing tips, and tail feathers edged with white. I have seen some gray swallows which are now gathering in flocks preparatory to going south, and several sparrows much like our field sparrows; and sandpipers and upland plover, very small. The gray crows have a coarse croak like a raven, “Krakers” they are called. In England we saw and heard our only lark the day we drove from Ventnor to Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, but I heard no other song birds in England, only once, near Oxford, when I caught a note like our song sparrow’s, while crows and rooks swarmed everywhere from Southampton to Inverness. In Denmark there are many storks, and I there saw the nest of one, a gigantic mass of sticks and mud, built on the ridge of a barn, but I noticed few other birds, except the gulls and terns along the sea. At Vang, the other day, I saw, as I wrote you, the ptarmigan, and the capercailzie stuffed and mounted by a Norwegian living there; they are found on the mountains thereabouts; and a passenger, day before yesterday, on the Sogne-fjord-boat, had in his hand half a dozen ptarmigan, with their plumage already turning toward the winter’s white.
