is always falling
and adding to the pile. And it is the weight of all this fresh snow on
the top of the accumulation of centuries which produces the glaciers.

The Folgefond, in the Hardanger district, is the snowfield which most
people who visit Norway see sooner or later, and since it covers
an area of 120 square miles, at a height of about 5,500 feet above
the sea, it is visible from a great many points of view. It forms a
background to many a picture of the varied scenery of the Hardanger
Fjord, and it has the advantage of being easily accessible.

Of course, the belief in the old popular legends is dying out even in
Norway, but there are still some aged grandfathers and grandmothers
living near the great snowfield who can tell the tales as they were
told to them. Thus they relate that where the Folgefond now lies was
once a fertile and well-peopled valley, called Folgedalen, and that in
one night its farms, forests, people, and cattle were buried in snow as
a judgment for some great sin. One story ascribes the misfortune to the
curse of a gipsy woman, who had been refused alms by the priest; while
another relates that the valley was overwhelmed because the inhabitants
had murdered their liege lord, the petty King of the district.

But why it happened and how it happened does not really much matter,
for there the vast field of snow is to-day, and there it will doubtless
remain for many centuries to come. As has been said, you can go up
to the top of it and sleigh across a portion of its summit, or you
can potter round about it and examine its many glaciers.

The two largest glaciers of the Folgefond are the Buar Brae, near
Odda, and the Bondhus Brae, near Sundal, and to spend a day at either
of them is a real treat. But it is not wise to visit these glaciers
without someone who knows them, for one might easily fall into one
of the great fissures in the ice, known as crevasses, especially if
lately-fallen snow had hidden the opening of the mighty crack.

A glacier, as most people know (now that everyone goes to Switzerland,
if not to Norway), is nothing more than a river of ice; not a nice,
clean, smooth sheet of ice, but a rough mass of frozen billows,
almost blue in colour, and generally covered with sand, dust, and
stones of all sizes. Wherever, beneath the edge of a snowfield,
the country shapes itself into a valley, there you will find a glacier.

If you make a snowball, and keep pressing and kneading it in