Chapter III: Norway, Denmark, and Germany (3)

The buildings of this farm were clustered around a sort of court-yard enclosure, roughly flagged by slate. Most of the roofs were also slated; one or two were thatched, and these thatched roofs were the only thing that redeemed the gloom of the spot, the sods on these being bright with pansies and grasses and waving raspberry bushes. Here also we found the men of the family alone at home, the women being gone on their summering at the sæter. The youngest son showed us freely from room to room, and displayed with some pride the trunks full of blankets and linen, and the rows of women's dresses hanging in the chambers. On two sides of one large room these were hung thick one above another, no variety in them, and no finery; merely a succession of strong, serviceable petticoats, of black, green, or gray woollen. The gay jackets and stomachers were packed away in trunks; huge fur-lined coats, made of the same shape for men and for women, hung in the storeroom. Some of the trunks were red, painted in gay colors; some were of polished cedar, finished with fine brass mountings. As soon as a Norwegian girl approaches womanhood, one of these trunks is given her, set in its place in the clothes-room, and her accumulations begin. Clothes, bedding, and silver ornaments seem to be the only things for which the Norwegian peasant spends his money. In neither of these houses was there an article of superfluous furniture, not even of ordinary comfort. In both were the same bunk beds, built in under the eaves; the same loose, tossed straw, with blankets for covering; and only the coarsest wooden chairs and benches for seats. The young man opened his mother's trunk, and took from one corner a beautiful little silver beaker, with curling, prow-shaped handles. In this the old lady had packed away her silver brooches, buttons, and studs for the summer. Side by side with them, thrown in loosely among her white head-dresses and blouses, were half a dozen small twisted rolls of white bread. Sanna explained this by saying that the Norwegians never have this bread except at their most important festivals; it is considered a great luxury, and these had no doubt been put away as a future treat, as we should put away a bit of wedding-cake to keep. Very irreverently the son tipped out all his mother's ornaments into the bottom of the trunk, and proceeded to fill the little beaker with fiery brandy from a bottle which had been hid in another corner. From lip to lip it was passed, returning to him wellnigh untasted; but he poured the whole down at a draught, smacked his lips, and tossed the cup back into the trunk, dripping with the brandy. Very much that good old Norwegian dame, when she comes down in the autumn, will wonder, I fancy, what has happened to her nicely packed trunk of underclothes, dry bread, and old silver.

There were several storerooms in these farm buildings, and they were well filled with food, grain, flour, dried meats, fish, and towers of fladbröd. Looms with partly finished webs of cloth in them were there set away till winter; baskets full of carved yellow spoons hung on the wall. In one of the rooms, standing on the sill of the open window, were two common black glass bottles, with a few pond-lilies in each,--the only bit of decoration or token of love of the beautiful we had found. Seeing that I looked at the lilies with admiration, the young man took them out, wiped their dripping stems on his coat-sleeve, and presented them to me with a bow that a courtier might have envied. The grace, the courtesy, of the Norwegian peasant's bow is something that must date centuries back. Surely there is nothing in his life and surroundings to-day to create or explain it. It must be a trace of something that Olaf Tryggveson--that "magnificent, far-shining man"--scattered abroad in his kingdom eight hundred years ago, with his "bright, airy, wise way" of speaking and behaving to women and men.

One of the buildings on this farm was known, the young man said, to be at least two hundred years old. The logs are moss-grown and black, but it is good for hundreds of years yet. The first story is used now for a storeroom. From this a ladder led up to a half-chamber overhead, the front railed by a low railing; here, in this strange sort of balcony bedroom, had slept the children of the family, all the time under observation of their elders below.

Thrust in among the rafters, dark, rusty, bent, was an ancient sword. Our guide took it out and handed it to us, with a look of awe on his face. No one knew, he said, how long that sword had been on the farm. In the earliest writings by which the estate had been transferred, that sword had been mentioned, and it was a clause in every lease since that it should never be taken away from the place. However many times the farm might change hands, the sword must go with it, for all time. Was there no legend, no tradition, with it? None that his father or his father's father had ever heard; only the mysterious entailed charge, from generation to generation, that the sword must never be removed. The blade was thin and the edge jagged, the handle plain and without ornament; evidently the sword had been for work, and not for show. There was something infinitely solemn in its inalienable estate of safe and reverent keeping at the hands of men all ignorant of its history. It is by no means impossible that it had journeyed in the company of that Sigurd who sailed with his splendid fleet of sixty ships for Palestine, early in the twelfth century. Sigurd Jorsalafarer, or Traveller to Jerusalem, he was called; and no less an authority than Thomas Carlyle vouches for him as having been "a wise, able, and prudent man," reigning in a "solid and successful way." Through the Straits of Gibraltar to Jerusalem, home by way of Constantinople and Russia, "shining with renown," he sailed, and took a hand in any fighting he found going on by the way. Many of his men came from the region of the Sogne Fjord; and the more I thought of it the surer I felt that this old sword had many a time flashed on the deck of his ships.

Our second day opened rainy. The lake was blotted out by mist; on the fence under the willows sat half a dozen men, roosting as unconcernedly as if it were warm sunshine.

"It does wonder me," said Sanna, "that I find here so many men standing idle. When the railroad come, it shall be that the life must be different."

A heroic English party, undeterred by weather, were setting off in carioles and on horseback. Delays after delays occurred to hinder them. At the last moment their angry courier was obliged to go and fetch the washing, which had not arrived. There is a proverb in Norway, "When the Norwegian says 'immediately,' look for him in half an hour."

Finally, at noon, in despair of sunshine, we also set off: rugs, water-proofs; the india-rubber boot of the carriage drawn tight up to the level of our eyes; we set off in pouring sheets of rain for Gudvangen. For the first two hours the sole variation of the monotony of our journey was in emptying the boot of water once every five minutes, just in time to save a freshet in our laps. High mountain peaks, black with forests or icy white with snow, gleamed in and out of the clouds on either hand, as we toiled and splashed along. Occasional lightings up revealed stretches of barren country, here and there a cluster of farm-houses or a lowly church. On the shores of a small lake we passed one of these lonely churches. Only two other buildings were in sight in the vast expanse: one, the wretched little inn where we were to rest our horses for half an hour; the other, the parsonage. This last was a pretty little cottage, picturesquely built of yellow pine, half bowered in vines, looking in that lonely waste as if it had lost itself and strayed away from some civilized spot. The pastor and his sister, who kept house for him, were away; but his servant was so sure that they would like to have us see their home that we allowed her to show it to us. It was a tasteful and cosey little home: parlor, study, and dining-room, all prettily carpeted and furnished; books, flowers, a sewing-machine, and a piano. It did one's heart good to see such an oasis of a home in the wilderness. Drawn up on rests in a shed near the house, was an open boat, much like a wherry. The pastor spent hours every day, the maid said, in rowing on the lake. It was his great pleasure.

Up, up we climbed: past fir forests, swamps, foaming streams,--the wildest, weirdest road storm-driven people ever crossed. Spite of the rain, half-naked children came flying out of hovels and cabins to open gates: sometimes there would be six in a row, their thin brown hands all stretched for alms, and their hollow eyes begging piteously; then they would race on ahead to open the next gate. The moors seemed but a succession of enclosed pasture-lands. Now and then we passed a little knot of cabins close to the road, and men who looked kindly, but as wild as wild beasts, would come out and speak to the driver; their poverty was direful to see. At last, at the top of a high hill, we halted; the storm stayed; the clouds lifted and blew off. At our feet lay a black chasm; it was like looking down into the bowels of the earth. This was the Nerodal Valley; into it we were to descend. Its walls were three and four thousand feet high. It looked little more than a cleft. The road down this precipitous wall is a marvel of engineering. It is called the Stalheimscleft, and was built by a Norwegian officer, Captain Finne. It is made in a series of zigzagging loops, which are so long and so narrow that the descent at no point appears steep; yet as one looks up from any loop to the loop next above, it seems directly over his head. Down this precipice into the Nerodal Valley leap two grand fosses, the Stalheimfos and the Salvklevfos; roaring in ceaseless thunder, filling the air, and drenching the valley with spray. Tiny grass-grown spaces between the bowlders and the loops of the road had all been close mowed; spaces which looked too small for the smallest reaping-hook to swing in were yet close shorn, and the little handfuls of hay hung up drying on hand's-breadths of fence set up for the purpose. Even single blades of grass are too precious in Norway to be wasted.

As we walked slowly down this incredible road, we paused step by step to look first up, then down. The carriage waiting for us below on the bridge looked like a baby wagon. The river made by the meeting of these two great cataracts at the base of the precipice was only a little silver thread flowing down the valley. The cataracts seemed leaping from the sky, and the sky seemed resting on the hill-tops; masses of whirling and floating clouds added to the awesome grandeur of the scene. The Stalheimfos fell into a deep, basin-shaped ravine, piled with great bowlders, and full of birch and ash shrubs; in the centre of this, by some strange play of the water, rose a distinct and beautifully shaped cone, thrown up closely in front of the fall, almost blending with it, and thick veiled in the tumultuous spray,--a fountain in a waterfall. It seemed the accident of a moment, but its shape did not alter so long as we watched it; it is a part of the fall.

Five miles down this cleft, called valley, to Gudvangen run the road and the little river and the narrow strips of meadow, dark, thin, and ghastly; long months in utter darkness this Nerodal lies, and never, even at summer's best and longest, has it more than a half-day of sun. The mountains rise in sheer black walls on either hand,--bare rock in colossal shafts and peaks, three, four, and even five thousand feet high; snow in the rifts at top; patches of gaunt firs here and there; great spaces of tumbled rocks, where avalanches have slid; pebbly and sandy channels worn from side to side of the valley, where torrents have rushed down and torn a way across; white streams from top to bottom of the precipices, all foam and quiver, like threads spun out on the sward, more than can be counted; they seem to swing down out of the sky as spider threads swing swift and countless in a dewy morning.

Sanna shuddered. "Now you see, one could not spend a whole day in Nerodal Valley," she said. "It does wonder me that any people will live here. Every spring the mountains do fall and people are killed."

On a narrow rim of land at base of these walls, just where the fjord meets the river, is the village of Gudvangen, a desolate huddle of half a dozen poor houses. A chill as of death filled the air; foul odors arose at every turn. The two little inns were overcrowded with people, who roamed restlessly up and down, waiting for they knew not what. An indescribable gloom settles on Gudvangen with nightfall. The black waters of the fjord chafing monotonously at the base of the black mountains; the sky black also, and looking farther off than sky ever looked before, walled into a strip, like the valley beneath it; hemmed in, forsaken, doomed, and left seems Gudvangen. What hold life can have on a human being kept in such a spot it is hard to imagine. Yet we found three very old women hobnobbing contentedly there in a cave of a hut. Ragged, dirty, hideous, hopeless one would have thought them; but they were all agog and cheery, and full of plans for repairing their house. They were in a little log stable, perhaps ten feet square, and hardly high enough to stand upright in: they were cowering round a bit of fire in the centre; their piles of straw and blankets laid in corners; not a chair, not a table. Macbeth's witches had seemed full-dressed society women by the side of these. We peered timidly in at the group, and they all came running towards us, chattering, glad to see strangers, and apologizing for their condition, because, as they said, they had just turned in there together for a few days, while their house across the way was being mended. Not a light of any description had they, except the fire. The oldest one hobbled away, and returned with a small tallow candle, which she lit and held in her hand, to show us how comfortable they were, after all; plenty of room for three piles of straw on the rough log floor. Their "house across the way" was a little better than this; not much. One of the poor old crones had "five children in America." "They wanted her to come out to America and live with them, but she was too old to go away from home," she said. "Home was the best place for old people," to which the other two assented eagerly. "Oh, yes, home was the best place. America was too far."

It seemed a miracle to have comfort in an inn in so poverty-stricken a spot as this, but we did. We slept in straw-filled bunks, set tight into closets under the eaves; only a narrow doorway by which to get in and out of bed; but there were two windows in the room, and no need to stifle. And for supper there was set before us a stew of lamb, delicately flavored with curry, and served with rice, of which no house need be ashamed. That so palatable a dish could have issued from the place which answered for kitchen in that poor little inn was a marvel; it was little more than a small dark tomb. The dishes were all washed out-of-doors in tubs set on planks laid across two broken chairs at the kitchen door; and the food and milk were kept in an above-ground cellar not three steps from the same door. This had been made by an immense slab of rock which had crashed down from the mountain top, one day, and instead of tearing through the house and killing everybody had considerately lodged on top of two other bowlders, roofing the space in, and forming a huge stone refrigerator ready to hand for the innkeeper. The enclosed space was cold as ice, and high enough and large enough for one to walk about in it comfortably. I had the curiosity to ask this innkeeper how much he could make in a year off his inn. When he found that I had no sinister motive in the inquiry, he was freely communicative. At first he feared, Sanna said, that it might become known in the town how much money he was making, and that demands might be made on him in consequence. If the season of summer travel were very good, he said he would clear two hundred dollars; but he did not always make so much as that. He earned a little also by keeping a small shop, and in the winter that was his only resource. He had a wife and two children, and his wife was not strong, which made it harder for them, as they were obliged always to keep a servant.

Even in full sunlight, at nine of the morning, Gudvangen looked grim and dangerous, and the Nerö Fjord water black. As we sailed out, the walls of the valley closed up suddenly behind us, as with a snap which might have craunched poor little Gudvangen to death. The fjord is as wild as the pass; in fact, the same thing, only that it has water at bottom instead of land, and you can sail closer than you can drive at base of the rocky walls. Soon we came to the mouth of another great fjord, opening up another watery road into the mountains; this was the Aurland, and on its farther shore opened again the Sognedal Fjord, up which we went a little way to leave somebody at a landing. Here were green hills and slopes and trees, and a bright yellow church, shaped like a blancmange mould in three pyramid-shaped cones, each smaller than the one below.

"Here is the finest fruit orchard in all Scandinavia," said Sanna, pointing to a pretty place just out of the town, where fields rose one above the other in terraces on south-facing slopes, covered thick with orchards. "It belongs to an acquainted with me: but she must sell it. She is a widow, and she cannot take the care to herself."

Back again across the mouth of the Aurland Fjord, and then out into the great Sogne Fjord, zigzagging from side to side of it, and up into numerous little fjords where the boat looked to be steering straight into hills,--we seemed to be adrift, without purpose, rather than on a definite voyage with a fixed aim of getting home. The magnificent labyrinths of walled waters were calm as the heavens they reflected; the clouds above and clouds below kept silent pace with each other, and we seemed gliding between two skies. Great snow fjelds came in sight, wheeled, rose, sank, and disappeared, as we passed; sometimes green meadows stretched on either side of us, then terrible gorges and pinnacles of towering rock. Picture after picture we saw, of gay-colored little villages, with rims of fields and rocky promontories; snow fjelds above, and fir forests between; glittering waterfalls shooting from the sky line to the water, like white lightning down a black stone front, or leaping out in spaces of feathery snow, like one preternatural blooming of the forests all the way down the black walls rising perpendicularly thousands of feet; tiers of blue mountains in the distance, dark blue on the nearest, and shading off to palest blue at the sky line; the fjord dark purple in the narrows, shading to gray in the opens; illuminated spaces of green, now at the shore, now half-way up, now two-thirds-way up to the sky; tops of hills in sunlight; bars of sunlight streaming through dark clefts. Then a storm-sweep across the fjord, far in our wake,--swooping and sweeping, and gone in a half-hour; blotting out the mountains; then turning them into a dark-slate wall, on which white sails and cross-sunbeams made a superb shining. And so, between the sun and the storm, we came to Valestrand, and sent off and took on boat-loads of pleasuring people,--the boats with bright flags at prow and stern, and gay-dressed women with fantastic parasols like butterflies poised on their edges,--Valestrand, where, as some say, Frithiof was born; and as all say, he burnt one of Balder's great temples. Then Ladvik, on a green slope turning to gold in the sun; its white church with a gray stone spire relieved against a bank of purple gloom; the lights sinking lower and the shadows stretching farther every minute; shadows of hills behind which the sun had already gone, thrown sharp and black on hills still glowing in full light; hills before us, shimmering in soft silver gray and pale purple against a clear golden west; hills behind us, folding and folded in masses of rosy vapor; shining fosses leaping down among them; the colors changing like the colors of a prism minute by minute along the tops of the ranges,--this was the way our day on the Sogne Fjord drew near its ending. Industriously knitting, with eyes firm fastened on her needles, sat an English matron near us on the deck. Not one glance of her eye did she give to the splendors of sky and water and land about her.

"I do think that lady must be in want of stockings very much," remarked Sanna quietly; "but she need not to come to Norway to knit."

Far worse, however, than the woman who knitted were the women and the men who talked, loudly, stupidly, vulgarly, around us. It was mortifying that their talk was English, but they were not Americans. At last they drove us to another part of the deck, but not before a few phrases of their conversation had been indelibly stamped on my memory.

"Well, we were in Dresden two days: there's only the gallery there; that's time enough for that."

"Raphaels,--lots of Raphaels."

"I don't care for Raphaels, anyhow. I'll tell you who I like; I like Veronese."

"Well, I'm very fond of Tintoretto."

"I like Titians; they're so delicate, don't you know?"

"Well, who's that man that's painted such dreadful things,--all mixed up, don't you know? In some places you see a good many of them."

"You don't mean Rembrandt, do you? There are a lot of Rembrandts in Munich."

"There was one picture I liked. I think it was a Christ; but I ain't sure. There were four children on the ground, I remember."

When the real sunset came we were threading the rocky labyrinths of the Bergen Fjord. It is a field of bowlders, with an ocean let in; nothing more. Why the bowlders are not submerged, since the water is deep enough for big ships to sail on, is the perpetual marvel; but they are not. They are as firm in their places as continents, myriads of them only a few feet out of water; and when the sun as it sinks sends a flood of gold and red light athwart them, they turn all colors, and glow on the water like great smoke crystals with fire shining through. To sail up this fjord in the sunset is to wind through devious lanes walled with these jewels, and to look off, over and above them, to fields of purple and gray and green, islands on islands on islands, to the right and to the left, with the same jewel-walled lanes running east and west and north and south among them; the sky will stream with glowing colors from horizon to horizon, and the glorious silence will be broken by no harsher sound than the low lapsing of waters and the soft whirr of gray gulls' wings.

And so we came to Bergen in the bright midnight of the last of our four days.

Months afterwards Sanna sent me a few extracts from descriptions given by a Norwegian writer of some of the spots we had seen in the dim upper distances along the fjords,--some of those illuminated spaces of green high up among the crags, which looked such sunny and peaceful homes.

Her English is so much more graphic than mine that I have begged her permission to give the extracts as she wrote them:--

"Grand, glorious, and serious is the Sogne Fjord. Serious in
itself, and still more serious we find it when we know where
and how people do live there between mountains. And we must
wonder or ask, Is there really none places left, or no kind of
work for those people to get for the maintenance of the life,
but to go to such desolate and rather impassable a place?...

"More than half of the year are the two families who live on
the farm of Vetti separated from all other human beings. During
the winter can the usual path in the grass not be passed in
case of snow, ice, and perpetual slips, which leave behind
trace long out in the summer, because the sun only for a short
time came over this long enormous abyss, and does not linger
there long, so that the snow which has been to ice do melt very
slow, and seldom disappear earlier than in July. The short time
in the winter when the river Utla is frozen may the bottom of
the pass well be passed, though not without danger, on account
of the mentioned slips, which, with the power of the hurricane,
are whizzing down in the deep, and which merely pressure of the
air is so strong that it throw all down.

"Late in the autumn and in the spring is all approach to and
from Vetti quite stopped; and late in the autumn chiefly with
ground and snow slips, which then get loosened by the frequent
rain. The farm-houses is situate on a steep slope, so that the
one end of the lowest beam is put on the mere ground, and the
other end must be put on a wall almost three yards high. The
fields are so steep, and so quite near the dreadful precipice,
that none unaccustomed to it do venture one's self thither; and
when one from here look over the pass, and look the meadows
which is more hanging than laying over the deep, and which have
its grass mowed down with a short scythe, then one cannot
comprehend the desperate courage which risk to set about and
occupy one's self here, while the abyss has opened its swallow
for receiving the foolhardy.

"A little above the dwelling-houses is a quite tolerable plain;
and when one ask the man why he has not built his houses there,
he answers that owing to the snow-slips it is impossible to
build there.

"Through the valley-streams the Afdals River comes from the
mountains, run in a distance of only twenty yards from the
farm-houses, and about one hundred yards from the same pour
out itself with crash of thunder in a mighty foss. The rumble
of the same, and that with its hurling out caused pressure of
the air, is in the summer so strong that the dwelling-houses
seems to shiver, and all what fluids there in open vessels get
placed on the table is on an incessant trembling, moving almost
as on board a ship in a rough sea. The wall and windows which
turns to the river are then always moistened of the whipped
foam, which in small particles continually is thrown back from
the foss.

"By the side of this foss, in the hard granite wall which it
moisten, is a mined gut (the author says he can't call it a
road, though it is reckoned for that), broad enough that one
man, and in the highest one small well-trained horse, however
not by each other's side, can walk therein. This gut, which
vault is not so high that an full-grown man can walk upright,
is the farm's only road which rise to a considerable height.

"But as this gut could not get lightened in a suitable height,
one has filled up or finished the remaining gap with four
timber beams, four or five yards long, which is close to the
gut, and with its upper end leans on a higher small mountain
peak, which beside this is the fastening for the bridge over
the waterfall. In these beams is cut in flukes, just as the
steps of a staircase, and when one walks up these flukes one
looks between the beams the frothing foss beneath one's self,
while one get wrapped up of its exhalation clouds.

"The man told me that the pass also is to be passed with horse,
the time of the summer, and that all then is to be carried in a
pack-saddle to the farm, of his own horse, which is accustomed
to this trip. And when one know the small Lærdalske horses'
easiness, and the extraordinary security wherewith they can go
upon the most narrow path on the edge of the most dreadful
precipices, in that they place or cast the feet so in front of
each other that no path is too narrow for them, then it seems a
little less surprising.

"From the Vetti farm continues the pass in a distance of about
twenty-one English miles, so that the whole pass, then, is a
little more than twenty-four miles, and shall on the other side
of the farm be still more narrow, more difficult, and more
dreadful. The farmer himself and his people must often go there
to the woods, and for other things for his farm. There belongs
to this farm most excellent sæter and mountain fields,
wherefore the cattle begetting is here of great importance; and
also the most excellent tract of firs belong to this farm.

"I was curious to know how one had to behave from here to get
the dead buried, when it was impossible that two men could walk
by the side of each other through the pass, and I did even not
see how one could carry any coffin on horseback. I got the
following information: The corpse is to be laid on a thin
board, in which there is bored holes in both ends in which
there is to be put handles of rope; to this board is the corpse
to be tied, wrapped up in its linen cloth. And now one man in
the front and one behind carry it through the pass to the farm
Gjelde, and here it is to be laid into the coffin, and in the
common manner brought to the churchyard. If any one die in the
winter, and the bottom of the pass must be impassable then as
well as in the spring and in the autumn, one must try to keep
the corpse in an hard frozen state, which is not difficult,
till it can be brought down in the above-mentioned manner.

"A still more strange and sad manner was used once at a
cottager place called Vermelien. This place is lying in the
little valley which border to the Vetti's field. Its situation
by the river deep down in the pass is exceedingly horrid, and
it has none other road or path than a very steep and narrow
foot-path along the mountain wall side with the most dreadful
precipice as by the Vetti.

"Since the cottager people here generally had changed, no one
had dead there. It happened, then, the first time a boy, on
seventeen years old, died. One did not do one's self any
hesitation about the manner to bring him to his grave, and they
made a coffin in the house. The corpse was put in the coffin,
and then the coffin brought outside; and first now one did see
with consternation that it was not possible to carry the corpse
with them in this manner. What was to do then?

"At last they resolved to let the coffin be left as a _memento
mori_, and to place the dead upon a horse, his feet tied up
under the belly of the horse; against the mane on the horse was
fastened a well-stuffed fodder bag, that the corpse may lean to
the same, to which again the corpse was tied. And so the dead
must ride over the mountain to his resting-place by Fortun's
church in Lyster."

THE KATRINA SAGA.