e lake. This is the limit of trees, the end of the
growth of wood. The birch and willow are the last to drop out of the
long fight with frost. Their miniature thickets are noisy with the
cries of Fieldfare, Pipit, and Ptarmigan, but these are left behind on
nearing the upper plateau, where shade of rock and sough of wind are
all that take their place. The chilly Hoifjeld rolls away, a rugged,
rocky plain, with great patches of snow in all the deeper hollows, and
the distance blocked by snowy peaks that rise and roll and whiter
gleam, till, dim and dazzling in the north, uplifts the Jotunheim, the
home of spirits, of glaciers, and of the lasting snow.

The treeless stretch is one vast attest to the force of heat. Each
failure of the sun by one degree is marked by a lower realm of life.
The northern slope of each hollow is less boreal than its southern
side. The pine and spruce have given out long ago; the mountain-ash
went next; the birch and willow climbed up half the slope. Here,
nothing grows but creeping plants and moss. The plain itself is pale
grayish green, one vast expanse of reindeer-moss, but warmed at spots
into orange by great beds of polytrichum, and, in sunnier nooks,
deepened to a herbal green. The rocks that are scattered everywhere are
of a delicate lilac, but each is variegated with spreading frill-edged
plasters of gray-green lichen or orange powder-streaks and beauty-spots
of black. These rocks have great power to hold the heat, so that each
of them is surrounded by a little belt of heat-loving plants that could
not otherwise live so high. Dwarfed representatives of the birch and
willow both are here, hugging the genial rock, as an old French
habitant hugs his stove in winter-time, spreading their branches over
it, instead of in the frigid air. A foot away is seen a chillier belt
of heath, and farther off, colder, where none else can grow, is the
omnipresent gray-green reindeer-moss that gives its color to the
upland. The hollows are still filled with snow, though now it is June.
But each of these white expanses is shrinking, spending itself in
ice-cold streams that somehow reach the lake. These snoe-flaks show no
sign of life, not even the 'red-snow' tinge, and around each is a belt
of barren earth, to testify that life and warmth can never be divorced.

Birdless and lifeless, the gray-green snow-pied waste extends over all
the stretch that is here between the timber-line and the snow-line,
above wh