bid their entrance. The
intrepid sons of Norway cross these reefs on foot, springing from rock
to rock, undismayed at the abyss--a hundred fathoms deep and only six
feet wide--which yawns beneath them. Here a tottering block of gneiss
falling athwart two rocks gives an uncertain footway; there the
hunters or the fishermen, carrying their loads, have flung the stems of
fir-trees in guise of bridges, to join the projecting reefs, around and
beneath which the surges roar incessantly. This dangerous entrance to
the little bay bears obliquely to the right with a serpentine movement,
and there encounters a mountain rising some twenty-five hundred feet
above sea-level, the base of which is a vertical palisade of solid
rock more than a mile and a half long, the inflexible granite nowhere
yielding to clefts or undulations until it reaches a height of two
hundred feet above the water. Rushing violently in, the sea is driven
back with equal violence by the inert force of the mountain to the
opposite shore, gently curved by the spent force of the retreating
waves.

The fiord is closed at the upper end by a vast gneiss formation crowned
with forests, down which a river plunges in cascades, becomes a torrent
when the snows are melting, spreads into a sheet of waters, and then
falls with a roar into the bay,--vomiting as it does so the hoary pines
and the aged larches washed down from the forests and scarce seen amid
the foam. These trees plunge headlong into the fiord and reappear after
a time on the surface, clinging together and forming islets which float
ashore on the beaches, where the inhabitants of a village on the left
bank of the Strom-fiord gather them up, split, broken (though sometimes
whole), and always stripped of bark and branches. The mountain which
receives at its base the assaults of Ocean, and at its summit the
buffeting of the wild North wind, is called the Falberg. Its crest,
wrapped at all seasons in a mantle of snow and ice, is the sharpest peak
of Norway; its proximity to the pole produces, at the height of eighteen
hundred feet, a degree of cold equal to that of the highest mountains of
the globe. The summit of this rocky mass, rising sheer from the fiord
on one side, slopes gradually downward to the east, where it joins the
declivities of the Sieg and forms a series of terraced valleys, the
chilly temperature of which allows no growth but that of shrubs and
stunted trees.

The upper end of the fiord, where