Kitabı oku: «Through Scandinavia to Moscow», sayfa 6
XII
Over the Lonely Haukeli Fjeld – Witches and Pixies, and Maidens Milking Goats
Hotel Haukelid, September 17, 1902.
This morning we left Hotel Breifond about eight o’clock and although we started alone, three other carriages soon caught up with us, and we set off together, ours being the first in the line. As it is the etiquette of the drivers never to pass each other, we have kept this order all the day. Next behind us was a Dane with his Norwegian wife, from Bergen, to whom H talked in their own tongue. Next to them were the two young Frenchmen with whom I have managed to converse, and behind these rode a German and his frau, who were most icy until they learned we were not English but Americans, whereupon they grew friendly indeed. We have got well acquainted while walking together up the long mountain slopes.
Yesterday we crossed the divide at a maximum elevation of 3,392 feet, and were above the snow line; to-day we again traversed the snow-fields at a yet higher altitude, passing under one snow mass by a tunnel, where H took a snap-shot of me standing in the snow, and reached the maximum altitude of 3,500 feet.
From the emerald valley of the Roldals Vand we crept up a long ascent for twenty miles, and I walked the whole of it. We followed the foaming Vasdals Elv to its source, until all trees were below us, and only short grasses, mosses and lichens grew amid the masses of drear, black rock, and wide fields and patches of snow. This was the most desolate region I have ever yet beheld or set foot upon; no life of any sort; “aucuns animaux, aucuns oiseaux; seulement les roches, le silence et le froid,” as one of the young Frenchmen exclaimed! There was not even a gnat or a butterfly. The primordial adamant rock presented as sharp and unworn edges to the blows of the icy torrents as when God first made it. The sun was warm and all the streams brim full, swollen from the melting snows. High on the height of land we found two silent lakes, the Ulivaa Vand and the Staa Vand. No life stirred about them, although our driver asserted they were “alive with fish.”
On these silent heights with their mosses and lichens, goats and reindeer thrive, and the latter range throughout the year.
We dined near the summit at a neat log inn called Haukeli-Saeter upon a soup, boiled salmon, reindeer steak and vegetables, – all good. Here our Germans clamored for sauerkraut and bier, and were much perturbed at receiving instead schooners of sweet milk and caraway-seeded tea-cakes. The inn is built in typical Norse style, with sharp and elaborately carved gables, and is kept open chiefly for the benefit of tourist travel.
Our driver is a quaint and lackadaisical old Norsk, who speaks a drawling, ancient Roldal patois. The first day we could not do much with him, although H tried her best Danish. But to-day he is beginning to thaw out and has at last become really garrulous. He is full of peasant superstition and folk lore which he implicitly believes. These Haukeli Fjelde will never be inhabited by man, he says, for they are already the home of the giant and dangerous Trolls, mysterious and mighty spirits who are inimical to man. They dwell on the barest and bleakest and most desolate mountain tops, where they devour young kids and reindeer fawns and, occasionally, even dare to kidnap a child, and are always on the watch to steal a buxom lass. It is useless to chase or follow them, they are never to be caught, and while they may show themselves at times if they shall choose, yet they are invisible to most human eyes. He has never seen a Troll, he says, but once he knew an old man who had been scared by one which tried to catch him when a boy.
There are also witches upon the Haukeli mountain tops, the old man says. He is sure he has heard them hurtling through the air, sometimes, when driving alone in the dusk of midsummer nights, crossing the desolate heights of the Haukeli Fjeld. I asked him if they still rode on broomsticks as they used to do in Germany, but he declared that they were more bloodthirsty than that, for they always carried ancient Viking broadswords, which they had picked up after some of the big fights which take place before breakfast in Valhalla every morning among the Vikings. Every summer some few witches are sure to be seen or at any rate heard, by some lonely peasant caught by fatigue on a twilight mountain top. There is one more beautiful than all the rest, he says. He calls her “Hulda,” and says she is a great hand to seduce and beguile young men. She can fix herself up to appear very beautiful, and to look upon her is to fall fast in love with her. Then she taps a rock with a long staff she carries and lo! it opens and there within are splendid chambers, a fairy palace, with all the allurements of golden furnishings and sumptuous hangings and a table groaning under the weight of delicious things to eat. If, dazzled by this glimpse of paradise, the youth once enters and is taken in her arms and kissed by her, then it is all up with him. He never escapes, but after she has toyed with him to her heart’s content in idle dalliance, and grown tired of him, then are his blackened bones cast forth upon some barren mountain top, perhaps to be found long years afterward by wandering goatherd or venturesome hunter. Between these Trolls and the witches, H has acquired a most wholesome fear of the Haukeli Fjeld, and she vows she would never drive over it alone.
Also, the old man has at first hinted at and then confided to us that the Trolls and witches are not indeed the so serious menace they might seem, for they are really afraid of man and keep generally well out of his way; but that the real vexation of life comes from the little pixies and sprites, who love to live handily about your house, and who are always making trouble, either out of a spirit of pure mischief, or else by reason of jealousy or pique. They are “very touchy,” he says, and you never know when or how you may offend them. But if you do, then woe betide you. They will steal the feed out of your horse’s trough, or from his very nosebag right before your eyes, and so deft are they at their tricks that you can never catch them. You only discover that your horse gets thinner and thinner until he finally dies, while if they shall be pleased with what you have done or said you will find the horses always sleek and fat and able to do two days’ work in one. I asked him how he stood in with the pixies just now, for I thought his team looked rather poor, but he said that was by reason of the hard summer’s work, the pixies having done him no ill for several years. They also delight to milk the goats and cows upon the sly, he said, and will steal the cheese set out to dry, and often play such havoc with household supplies as to drive the peasants to despair. For this reason it is, that many good farmers set out little bowls of milk and bits of cheese in some silent meadow or mountain dell, where the pixies may eat quite undisturbed.
As if to emphasize the old man’s words, we just then passed the hut of a woman goatherd almost upon the summit of the vast lonely Haukeli Fjeld and there, set upon a little shelf, high up near the moss-grown roof, were a small milk-bowl and a bit of brown cheese, an offering to the elves and pixies of that place.
The information I here give you may be wrong in minor detail, for we could not always perfectly interpret the quaint and ancient dialect in which the facts were told, but H says she could make out the most of what the old man said; for after all Danish and Norse speech are very nearly the same.
We were now well over the height of land and were coasting down toward prospective supper. The barren waste of black and gray rocks, across which we had traveled, began to give place to greener slopes; the mosses had returned; the grass was peeping up again. Swinging around a well-graded curve, we dropped into a little valley. The evening sun was behind us, the slanting rays tipped peak and snowy crest with reddish gold, but the vale below was wrapped in soft shadow. On the left, stood a moss-roofed cabin, near where ran the road; on the right, across a boisterous brook, we saw a group of Norse maidens, clad in blue-and-red peasant costume, surrounded by a herd of goats. The goats were apparently in great excitement. Each young woman was following a goat and that particular goat walked with demure and expectant gait. One old gray goat moved with particularly stately step, while the lady by his side held in her hand a small wooden bucket. I presumed that, of course, she proposed to give that goat his evening meal. Imagine my astonishment when, before the goat really was aware, she collared it, swung her leg over it and holding it fast between her thighs, facing its rear, began energetically milking, not it, or him, but her! The goat had disappeared, only a tail and a head discovered themselves beyond the lady’s skirts, and the evening shadows gathered about that maid and goat, – that goat held tight as though in iron vise. The day was too nearly done for my kodak to avail, so I have tried to sketch the episode, and so also has one of our French companions – and I send you the pictures. If the old poet had only seen the tableau of goat and maid he never could have written the following lines which long ago my memory clipped from the Yale News:
“The milkmaid pensively milked the goat,
When, sighing, she paused to mutter,
I wish you brute, you’d turn to milk,
And the animal turned to butt her!”
We have driven some eighty kilometers to-day and have been in the fresh mountain air, open air, for eleven hours. H is growing plump, and her cheeks have caught the Norse red. The keen air makes our blood tingle in spite of the cold, for it is cold. On these summits ice forms the moment the sun is hid. We are in full winter clothing, and wrap our heavy sea rugs about us as we sit in the carriage. In a fortnight the snows will cover the passes and tourist travel will cease till another year.
During the last two days we have frequently met men bearing on their backs and dragging on sledges piles of birch branches, the twig ends with the leaves yet on, and we have noticed here and there, entire birch-growing hillsides where the saplings had all been trimmed, the tender twigs sheared off and frequently the lopped-off branches stacked up in bundles stuck in a handy tree-crotch. This is the winter fodder for the goats, and the birch twig is as important for them as is the hay for the cattle. Just as in Switzerland, large flocks of goats are pastured throughout the summer upon the higher mountain slopes and ridges, and much cheese is manufactured from their milk. Of sheep we have seen few, although I understand a good many are raised for the local demand for wool. Like Scotland, Norway is hereabouts too cold and harsh for sheep to do their best.
Nor have we noticed many fowls, turkeys or geese or ducks about the farmsteads, – only a few chickens here and there. This also is too cold a climate, with too rigorous and lengthy winters for poultry to be profitable. Nor have we had chicken set before us but the once when we supped with the inquisitive dame of Tonsaasen. Trout and reindeer steak as well as eggs we have often had, and once roast ptarmigan.
Neither in Britain, nor in France, nor in Germany have I ever seen a wooden house; all buildings there are of stone or brick; but here the buildings throughout the countryside are all of wood; hewn logs most frequently, not uncommonly of sawed lumber, these latter quite often painted white and red, reminding one of tidy New England. The roofs are steep to shed the snows or, otherwise, quite flat and covered with a layer of birch bark and then tight-growing sods and mosses, which covering the snow may melt upon but through which it will never soak.
To-day being Sunday, we have met many churchgoers upon the road, and have passed two churches where the Lutheran service was being held. During our drive we have constantly noted the number of these Lutheran churches, as well as the snug-built, substantial schoolhouses. Piety and intelligence deeply mark the lives of these Norse people. Just as in Denmark, so here also is the Lutheran church recognized and supported by the state, and its pastors constitute a formidable and influential body, guiding the thought of the Norwegian people. Apparently the schools here are as universal and as well attended as our own. Every Norwegian child, who is of school age, is compelled by law to go to school. Nowhere outside of my own country have I seen so many schoolhouses dotting the countryside. In England there are no common schools and no schoolhouses. In France the schoolhouses are hidden among the buildings of the clustered villages. In Switzerland, perhaps, the schoolhouse is as much in evidence as here, but in neither Germany nor Holland, although their universities lead the world, is there revealed the teaching of the common people as is done by the many schoolhouses of this northern land.
Now we are housed in a commodious and quite modern inn, and have had a delicious trout supper, all our four carriage-loads of travelers sitting at one long table, where H and I have been the stars – for we only and alone can talk equally to the Dane and his Norwegian wife, to the young Frenchmen, and to the German pair; while through us only can they exchange ideas, for we alone can talk to each in his own native tongue. “Ah! these Americans!” “You talk all the languages!” “How wide you see!” “While we, we do not see beyond the boundaries of France.” “We speak too seldom a foreign tongue.” “You are bigger-minded than are we!” So exclaimed one of our French friends.
XIII
Descending from the Fjelde – The Telemarken Fjords – The Arctic Twilight
Dalen, September 8, 1902, 7 P. M.
Our series of great rides on land and water is at an end. For eight days we have been inhaling the crisp, buoyant, ozone-laden atmosphere, viewing the majestic scenery, watching the sturdy, strong-faced men and women, the rosy, yellow-haired children; and now it is over. H and I agree that in our lives we will never again experience a more delightful outing – our sure-enough honeymoon.
This morning we left the Hotel Haukelid with only sixty kilometers for the day, and most of it down hill; since noon yesterday we have been coming down. Just a little snow was now to be seen far away upon distant summits, while forests of birches, interspersed with aspens, covered the nearer slopes. Our road led us along the borders of several exquisite lakes, the little Voxli Vand and then the greater Grungadals Vand, about a mile wide and ten or twelve miles long; frowning precipices and cloud-wrapped heights encircled us on every hand, their rocks now largely greened over with mosses, and birches – only a few firs – growing wherever trees might thrust their roots. Then we drove through a narrow clove, along a frothing torrent, and came to another vand equally shut in, but not so long nor so wide, – a greener, warmer valley, Boertedals Vand in the Boerte Dal. Here we dined at Hotel Boerte, rested till 3 p. m., and then got away for one of the finest thirty kilometers of the trip. If we only had had Ole Mon to drive us, how perfect would have been the day! I imagined we had already come down enough to be at the bottom, but we were yet to descend a mighty canyon with the road blasted out of the precipice’s side, and walled in with rock posts and iron defenders, much like the Laera Dal, while far beneath us wound a silver thread, the almost imperceptible roar of whose waters floated up a tremulous murmur. We came down at a rattling trot, every moment unfolding new vistas of vale and precipice and mountain. After two hours of this fearful, yet joyous, coasting we crossed a wide-spanning iron bridge and swept out into the charming vale of Dalen, at the head of the Bandaks Vand, where now we are. The mountains are here clothed in heavy forests of birch and much deciduous timber, only a little of the fir; I can scarcely realize that yesterday we were up amongst the mosses, the lichens and the snows. As we descended we kept taking off our wraps; our rugs were folded up; H took off her golf cape, then her jacket; she wanted to ride with bared head, so soft and warm had grown the air.
Kristiania, Norway, September 10, 1902.
Yesterday, we left Dalen at the head of navigation on the Bandaks Vand, boarded a taut little steamboat about 150 feet long, built for deep water, and traveled sixty-five kilometers through a succession of vands and fjords– the Telemarken Fjords – canals and locks – twenty locks in all – to Skien (called “Sheen”), where we took the railway for Kristiania, arriving at midnight.
The lakes were long, narrow and mostly shut in by heavily-timbered mountains, which as always, lifted up to enormous heights, green vales and valleys opening in between, where were picturesque hamlets and neat, thrifty-looking farmsteads.
Nothing here impresses me more than the great patience and tireless energy of the “Norsks,” as they call themselves. The magnificent roads, superior to those of England, equal, almost equal to those of France; the canals, blasted for miles through solid granite; the railways, which are as good as our own; the little boats so perfectly appointed. The Norwegians impress you as being born seamen; they know how to build and how to sail a boat, and you feel it.
Standing upon the forward deck, watching the changing panorama of vale and lake and mountain, I became so absorbed in the enchanting pictures that it was some moments before I noticed a slit-eyed, high-cheek-boned, black-straight-haired, short, pudgy youth or man – hard to tell which – a sure-enough Lap if ever there was one, who was making vain efforts to hold conversation with me. He spoke slowly and with some hesitation in perfect Cockney English. I at once gave him my ear, and asked him where he had learned to speak so well. “Hi ave been a cook in Lonnon,” he said. “Hi ave been hassistant cook in a Hinglish otel, you know. Hi am just now leaving the otel at Dalen, where Hi ave been hassistant cook this summer, you know.” Whereupon he told me of his experiences in London. How he landed there from a Norwegian ship, friendless and unknown, and made his way by his aptitude in wiping dishes! And some day he “oped” to go to “Hamerica” and there own a kitchen all for himself. “Ow strange it must be for an Hamerican to see real mountains,” he exclaimed, and I discovered that the only America he knew about was the prairie land of the flat west.
Upon my asking whether he was not a Laplander, he resented the suggestion with great vehemence, declaring himself to be a Viking pure, and he begged me to let him know if I should learn of any good openings for dish-wipers in America, especially if it would lead to the dignity of cook. His manner was frank and simple, wholly free from self-consciousness, except as he took great pride in being able to speak the English tongue. In Norway there are no classes and all men stand equal before the law. It is as respectable there to work as it is in America, and similarly men meet you as your natural equals. There is none of that offensive subserviency which so jars upon one in most of the monarchy and aristocracy bestridden lands.
The volume of water which flows from these lakes and through these deep canals is immense and we have sometimes swept along the narrower channels at really an exciting pace. We had just passed through the beautiful Flaa Vand and descended the deep full-flowing river, the Eids Elv, with its many locks, to the greater Nordsjoe Vand, when we drew up beside a little pier. There were many people upon it. Evidently, there was here gathered an unusual crowd, and down the hillside leading toward us came yet others. The whole community had turned out. Two tall, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, fair-haired young men were the center of the throng; about them the others pressed. They were neatly dressed, fine-looking fellows, and the men and women were kissing them good-bye. They were going to America, perhaps never to return. The mother, a gentle-faced, white-haired old lady, wept on the necks of each of them, and the white-haired father kissed them upon either cheek, and then everybody rushed in to shake their hands. They were going to America where so many of Norway’s most ambitious and able sons had gone before. The whole countryside would watch their career and wait for news of their success! Two iron-bound chests were dragged on to the boat. The young men stepped alertly aboard, their faces flushed with the excitement of the farewells and the anticipations of the land across the sea. As I watched them and their family and friends waving their adieus I could not but ponder upon this instinct of the old-world races, my own among the rest, to go out and seize life’s prizes even across the widest waters. The leave-taking I was now beholding must be not unlike that of the men and women who in the days of Pilgrim and Puritan and Cavalier left little England to found a community where freedom and opportunity are still the loadstones which attract the energy and youth of all the world.
In traveling through Norway, I have been greatly surprised to see so many newly-built farmhouses, barns and farm buildings, new fences and modern gates. Everywhere the old and tumbled-down is being replaced by the substantial and modern. I have seen nothing like this anywhere in Europe; nowhere so general a replacing of the old with the new. Many of the new farmhouses are not merely substantial, but are architecturally attractive. There must be abundant money coming from somewhere to pay the cost of this universal rebuilding. I have asked about it more than once and every time I receive the same reply. “The sons have gone to America, they are in Chicago, in Minnesota, in Dakota. They have grown rich. They are sending back the money. They want the old places made as trim and spick as though they were in America.” “Put everything in good repair,” they say, “never mind the cost.” And then, every few years they return with the American grandchildren to see the beloved old folks. More and more of these American-Norwegians are coming every year to holiday in the fatherland. Many now regularly sojourn throughout the summer. A few, a very few, remain to end their days on the loved home-soil.
I also learn that it is to supply the demand of this increasing travel from America to Norway that the Scandinavian-American line have recently put on the large ocean steamers now sailing direct from New York to Kristiansand, with accommodations equal to anything which has hitherto entered the ports of Germany and England and France.
The other day at Loeken, we were waited on at table by a fine-looking young woman who spoke perfect United States. She had an air about her of comfortable independence. The house, the farm buildings, everything about the place was new and neat. While we were talking with her, she told us that she had a brother and an uncle in the far west, one at Spokane, who was rich. She was living with him when word came that the old father had passed away. She was needed at home to care for the mother and the younger children, so she returned; and the brother sent back the money to have the old place put in perfect repair.
This intimate connection between our thriving west and Norwegian home life, largely explains, I think, that independent American spirit which now so prominently marks Norway, and the growth and assertion of which is driving her by natural momentum away from the hectoring ties of franchise-constricted, aristocratic Sweden, pushing her toward her inevitable destiny – to become a Republic.
The immigration from Norway to the United States has taken from her nearly one-half the population, a much larger percentage than has yet come forth from Sweden. Although even there, so great is now the exodus, that the Swedish Ministry is alarmed; there is also uneasiness in Norway. Recently, laws have been enacted prohibiting the steamship agents from spreading among the people the glowing accounts of America, by means of which so many steerage tickets are sold, but all the same, the propaganda is persistently carried on. At Skogstad, the other day, I fell in with an alert-looking, quiet-mannered man, who, after he learned I was an American, confided to me that he himself was from Minnesota. He had been born in Norway, but went to America when a boy. He was now back in Norway representing large farming interests in the Northwest, and his business was to recruit farm hands for the western wheat fields. He said he had penetrated during the past three years into every nook and cranny of Norway, everywhere finding out what vigorous and sturdy young men would like to go to America, and then arranging with them to pay their passage, and supply sufficient funds to enable them to pass the immigration inspectors, and providing also their railroad transportation to the west. “They are a splendid and hard working lot of men,” he said. “We want all of them we can get. And most of them do well when they reach America; many of them become rich men.” He was traveling in the disguise of an itinerant doctor selling herbs and roots.
Crossing the mountain this side of Boerte, where the road wound up through the fir forest to avoid an immense cliff which jutted into the lake, I stopped and dug up a little seedling fir, surely a real Norway spruce. I took it up with care and have now brought it to Kristiania and to-day am sending it to America by mail wrapped in damp mosses, and trust that it will reach Kanawha with life enough to live and thrive in its West Virginia home. Along the roadside, not far from where I found the seedling, were lying a fine pair of skjis, just as the wearer laid them aside, only to be worn when winter shall return. The Norwegian does not need to lock his door!
Upon the mossy, marshy, moorland summits and divides which we have traversed, I have noticed widespread beds of peat. In some places these are extensively worked, large areas being uncovered and the squares of peat piled up to dry. The existence of this fuel has proved a godsend to Norway, for the forests are often distant and year by year the woodlands diminish. Although there are some inferior coal beds in southern Sweden, there are none in Norway, and for fuel her peat beds and her forests are her sole domestic supply. And yet, despite this lack of fuel, it seems to me that Norway is dowered with enormous stores of power. She possesses water power without stint. King Winter surely cannot freeze up all the streams. Will not the day yet come when the harnessed water powers of Norway may run the turbines which will supply the world?
It is yet early September; the belated summer of this far northern land, to our strange eyes, is just begun. The meadows are green; the fields of grain are scarcely yellowed; in the markets of Kristiania we see daily exposed for sale fresh-ripened strawberries; in our Virginian latitude it would be the season of the month of May. Yet we see big stacks of firewood piled near each farmhouse door; we see the cabin newly banked with earth against the frost; at blacksmith’s shop we see men hammering on well-used sled; alongside the road, awaiting the winter’s need, lies an upturned snowplow newly ironed; everywhere men are making ready for the cold. In a fortnight the highway across the Haukeli Fjeld will be blocked with new-fallen snow. In a month the jingling bells of sleighs and sledges will sound along the now verdant valley of the Baegna Elv.
A year ago, when traveling in Mexico, in southern Michoacan, the tropical precipitancy of the night was sure to take me unawares. I was never quite prepared for the sharp transition from day to night. The hot red sun rested a moment above the towering Cordillera, then it dipped behind, and the cold white stars instantly shone forth. Here in Norway my senses are equally surprised. It is already September and yet “early candle light,” means near ten o’clock. The day dies slowly. The contours of vale and mountain almost imperceptibly fade upon the eye. A violet blueness softens form and hue. Little by little the violet changes into gray, and then the grayness pervades the air as though the shadow of some phantom raven’s wing overspread the world.
At nine o’clock, at half past nine, at ten o’clock, the goats and cattle are awake – we have made long day-drives by reason of the limits to our time – I wonder if they ever sleep. The sparrows and gray-coated crows fly soberly across our way; a magpie softly flutters to the road. I hear no bird-songs, only faint twitters, no chirping crickets, no piping frogs and newts, none of the evening sounds of my Virginian countryside. A hush creeps over dal and fjeld and fjord, even as do the mysterious violet and gray shadows. We ourselves are drowsed. I do not speak to H nor she to me. To the ponies Ole Mon has ceased to talk. The world is stilled. We draw long breaths, inhale the delicious air, lean back against the cushions of our seat, and daydream amidst this hush of man and thing. The old Norse driver of the Roldal cautions H to watch. “This is the hour,” he says, “when the elves and pixies stir abroad. Count the fifth meadow from where you stand and there they are always sure to be.” Thus have we driven through the twilight, the mysterious, lingering twilight of this far and almost Arctic North.
This is the last letter you will receive from Norway and I am sure that you will agree with me, after reading what I have sent you, that nowhere in all the world may one have a more delightful outing.
As to expenses, I figure it up that the total cost for both of us is a little less than five dollars per day, which includes our carriage, our driver, our eating, our sleeping and the liberal fees which, like good Americans, we have everywhere bestowed. Here in Norway the oere (two and one-half cents) is as big as the quarter, and the kroner (twenty-seven cents) as big as the dollar.
