Through Scandinavia to Moscow

    Laerdalsoeren, Norge, September 3, 1902.

We left Skogstad early and began to climb a long ascent, a dozen miles of grade, still following the valley of the Baegna Elv foaming and tossing by our side. The two days so far had been clear and cloudless, but now the air was full of a fine mist, and we probably ascended a thousand feet before the curtain lifted and a panorama of snow-capped mountains, profound valleys, and sheer precipices burst upon us.

A thousand rills and rivulets and brawling brooks streaked the green slopes with threads and lines of white; mosses and lichens softened the black rock-masses; blooming heather, and a plant with fine red and yellow leaf gave color to the heights between the sombre greenness of the fir forests below and the whiteness of the snow-fields above. I have never before seen such stupendous precipices, such tremendous heights; neither Switzerland nor Mexico, Alps nor Cordilleras lift themselves in so precipitous ascent.

After a two hours’ climb, all the way listening to the roar of the Elv choking the gorge a thousand feet below our way, we met its waters issuing quietly from yet another lake, the little Utro Vand, surrounded by snow-crowned summits, the snow-fields creeping almost to the water’s edge, also passing on our right, the road which leads to the Tyin Vand and the ice-crowned summits of the Jotunheim. Here was a large and comfortable inn, Nystuen by name, and Ole Mon gave the ponies their first morning’s feed, adding an armful of mountain hay to the oatmeal diet. Half an hour’s rest is the usual limit, and the ponies seem to know their business and eat their fare on time. In Mexico, horses are fed grain but once in twenty-four hours, and that at midnight, so that all hearty food will be digested before the early morning start. Here a horse is kept full all the time to do his best; difference of climate and latitude, I suppose.

Just beyond the Nystuen Vand, we crossed the height of land between the waters of east and west Norway, and now the streams were running the other way. We were up 3,294 feet, and the summits round about us – rising yet two and three thousand feet higher – were deeply snow-marked – great patches and fields of snow. Then we came to another succession of four more vands, like steps, each bigger than the one above it, and a roaring river that proportionately grew in size. The road became steeper and we fairly scampered down to a fine inn, painted red with curiously-carven Norse ornamentation on the gables, called Maristuen. Here we had fresh salmon, and more good coffee. For breakfast we were given trout and eggs, now salmon and a delicious custard for dessert. At table we met a Mr. C and wife, of Chicago, going over our trail, and we may meet them again in Stockholm. They are anxious to go on to Russia after seeing Stockholm, and have urged us to go along also. Across the table from us sat a dear old white-haired grandmother from Bergen with a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired granddaughter – a Viking Juno. They are driving across to Odnaes in their own carriage, a curious, old-fashioned trille, low and comfortable with a mighty top. The old lady is stacked up between pillows of eider down, and the blue-eyed granddaughter is full of tender care. We spake not to them nor they to us, but we smiled at one another and that made us friends. They both waved farvel as they drove away.

And then, about two o’clock, we went on again for forty miles down to the level of Laerdalsoeren and the sea, on the Sogne Fjord, where now we are. We were to descend some 3,000 feet, and here began one of the most exciting experiences of my life. The mountains kept their heights; we alone came lower, all down a single dal. Most of the road was hewn out of the side of precipices – a gallery; great stones were set endwise about two feet apart on the outer edge, and sometimes bound together by an iron rail; a slope down which we rolled at a flying trot, coasted down – the roaring, foaming river below, far below. Close to us were falls and cascades and cataracts, and the stupendous mountains, the snow-capped rock-masses lifting straight up thousands of feet. H grew so excited, exclaiming over the mighty vistas of rock and water and distant valley, that I had fairly to hold her in; and ever we rolled down and down and down, spanking along with never a pause for nearly thirty miles, the spinning wheels never once catching the ponies’ flying heels. Great driving that of Ole Mon, great speeding that of the sturdy ponies; marvelous macadamized roadway, smooth as New York’s Fifth Avenue! Water bursts, misty cascades, descending hundreds of feet, sprayed us, splashed us, dashed us, as we went on and on and on, only the gigantic precipices growing higher and higher and higher, and the ever-present snowy summits more and more supreme above us.

Then we swept out into a green valley, hemmed in on either hand by sombre precipices rising straight up for three and four and five thousand feet, and hove to at the farmstead of Kvamme for the ponies to be fed once more before their last descent. A mile or two further on the precipices choke together forming a deep gorge, called the Vindhelle, where it looks as though the mountains had been cracked apart.

The Norwegian farmer, like the Swiss, not only makes his living from the warm bottom-lands, which he cultivates, but also from the colder uplands to which his goats and cattle are driven in the early summer, and where the surplus grasses are painstakingly gathered with the sickle. We were driving quietly along when my attention was attracted to a[Pg 71][Pg 72] couple of women standing with pitchforks in their hands near a cock of hay. The hay was fresh mown, but I could see no hay-fields round about. They were looking intently at the distant summit of the precipice towering above them. My eye followed theirs. I could barely make out a group of men shoving a mass of something over the edge, and then I beheld the curious sight of a haymow flying through the air. Nearer it came, and nearer until it landed at the women’s feet. I then made out a wire line connecting a windlass set in the ground near where the women stood and reaching up to the precipice’s verge, whence came the hay. The hay was wound about this line. In this manner is the hay crop of these distant uplands safely delivered at the little gaard or farmstead in the valley’s lap. From these mountain altitudes the milk and cheese and butter which the goats and cows afford are also sometimes lowered by this telegraph. In Switzerland, I have seen communications of this sort for shorter distances, but never before beheld a stack of hay flying through the air for half a mile.

This Laera River with its dal (dale, valley), is famous for its trout and salmon. We passed several men and boys trying their luck, one, an Englishman, up to his waist in the ice-cold tide. We have now put up at a snug hotel, quite modern; English is spoken here. And – but I forgot; when we stopped to feed the ponies, right between the two descents, we made solemn friendship with the old Norseman who here keeps the roadhouse; his daughter “had been in Chicago,” she spoke perfect United States, and took us to see, hard by, the most ancient church in Norway, the church of Borgund, eight hundred to one thousand years old. It is very quaint, with strange Norse carving and Runic inscriptions. I gave our pretty guide a kroner for her pains. On returning to the house, she handed it to the old man, who took out a big leathern wallet and put the coin away. We had meant it all for her, and by reason of her knowing Chicago had made the fee quite double size.

To-morrow we sail for six hours out upon the Sogne Fjord to Gutvangen, then drive by carriage to Eida, on the Hardanger Fjord, all yet among these stupendous mountains.

I was sitting in the little front room of the inn waiting for supper, when our driver, Ole Mon, came in to settle our account, for his trip was at an end. After I had paid him and added a few oeres and a kroner for trinkgeld, at the liberality of which he seemed to be much gratified, he produced from the inner pocket of his coat a goodly-sized blank book, which he handed to me, and begged that I would set down therein a recommendation of his qualities as a driver and a guide. In the book were already a number of brief statements in French and German and Norwegian, by different travelers, declaring him to be a “safe and reliable man,” who had “brought them to their journey’s end without mishap.” I took the book and wrote down some hurried lines. When I had finished, he gazed upon the foreign writing and then disappeared with the book into the kitchen to consult the cook, who had lived in Minneapolis. He presently reappeared, his eyes big with wonder and a manner of profound deference. He now advised me that he would deem it a great honor to be permitted to drive us free of charge, next morning, from the hotel to the steamer, a couple of miles distant. He further said, that he had decided to take the sea trip to Gutvangen on our ship and would there secure for us the best carriage and driver of the place. He evidently regarded me as some famous bard, to whom it would be difficult to do sufficient honor. The lines were these:

Aye! Ole Mon, you are a dandy whip,
You are a corker and a daisy guide.
You talk our tongue and rarely make a slip,
You’ve taken us a stunner of a ride.
And when from Norge’s fjelds and fjords we sail,
And in America tell of what we’ve seen,
Our friends will stand astonished at the tale,
And next year bid you take them where we’ve been.

IX

A Day Upon the Sogne Fjord

    Stalheim Hotel, Norway, September 4, 1902.

To-day we have spent mostly on the water. We left Laerdalsoeren – the mouth of the valley of the river Laera – by ship, a tiny ship, deep-hulled and built to brave the fiercest gales, a boat of eighty to one hundred tons. Casting off from the little pier at eight o’clock, we were upon the waters of the majestic Sogne Fjord until after 3 p. m. This great fjord is the first body of water that I have seen which to my mind is really a fjord, the others along the shores of which we have journeyed for the past three days, including the last and least, the Smidal and the Bruce Fjords, were only mountain tarns, what in Norse speech is termed a “Vand.” While I had read much of fjords, never till to-day have I comprehended their marvelous grandeur, the overwhelming magnitude of the earth’s convulsions which eons ago cracked open their tremendous depths and heights. Although their bottoms lie deeper than the bottom of the sea, (4,000 feet deep in some places), so the Captain tells me, yet up out of these profound waters rise the gigantic mountains (fjeld) five and six thousand feet into the blue sky, straight up as it were, with hundreds of cascades and foaming waterfalls, sometimes the tempestuous tides of veritable rivers, leaping down the black rocks and splashing into space, and everywhere above them all are the snow-fields, the eternal snow-fields.

Sometimes when the precipices are sheltered and sun-warmed, their surface is green with mosses and banded with yellow gorse, and with white and pink and purple heather, and barred with scarlet and gray lichens. The waters were so deep, the precipices so sheer that often our ship sailed not more than twenty or thirty feet distant from them; the misty spray of the streams dissolving into impalpable dust hundreds of feet above us, dampening us like rain, or windblown, flying away in clouds of vaporous smoke.

Here and there along the more open parts of the fjord were bits of green slope with snug farmsteads, a fishing boat swinging to a tiny pier or tied to the very house itself. Sometimes, perched on a rocky shelf, grass-grown and high-up a thousand feet, we would discern a clinging cabin, and once we espied a grazing cow that seemed to be hanging in mid air. No patch of land lay anywhere about that was not dwelt upon, tilled or grazed by some man or beast. The climate of western Norway is mild and humid, tempered as it is by the Gulf Stream. These coasts have always been well peopled, sea and soil yielding abundant living to the hardy Norsk. The fjords are the public highways and upon their icefree waters vigorous little steamships ply back and forth busied with incessant traffic through all the year. Our course led us up many winding arms and watery lanes to cozy hamlets nestled at the mouth of some verdant dal, where we would lie-to a few minutes to put off and take on passengers and freight. We also carried the mails. At each stopping-place the ship’s mate would hand out the bags to the waiting official, often an old man, more generally a rosy-cheeked young woman, and carefully take a written memorandum of receipt, when bag and maiden and many of the waiting crowd would disappear. Once or twice the bags were loaded upon one of the curious two-wheeled carts called stolkjaerres driven by a husky boy, when cart and horse and boy at once set off at lively gallop. In winter time sledges and men on skjis replace the handy stolkjaerre, and thus all through the year are the mails efficiently distributed. The captain tells me that a great proportion of the letters received and sent are from and to America, where so many of Norway’s most energetic and capable young men are growing rich, and that a large proportion of these letters received are registered, and contain cash or money orders remitted to the families at home. What wonder is it that these thousand white-winged missives, which continually cross the sea, have made and are now making the ancient Kingdom almost a Democratic state! At one of these hamlets, Aurland by name, I caught with my camera a pretty Norwegian lass in full native costume, such as has been worn from time immemorial by the women of the Sogne Fjord, – a charming picture.

Toward three o’clock we sailed up a shadowy canyon, the Naeroe Fjord, under mighty overhanging precipices, arriving at Gudvangen, our voyage’s end. Here carriages awaited us and here Ole Mon, who has sailed with us throughout the day, after having driven us down to the boat himself and refused all pay, handed us over to the driver of the best vogn (wagon) of the lot, with evidently very particular instructions as to our welfare. In fact, H tells me, Ole Mon has spent the day with his book of recommendation open in his hand, calling the world’s attention to my glowing rhymes, and pointing me out with an air of profound deference as an illustrious, although to him unknown, bard. We bid him farvel, with real sorrow, and regretted that he might not have driven us to the very end.

We now went on ten kilometers through a narrow clove, between enormous heights, passing the Jordalsnut, towering above us, straight up more than three thousand feet, and straining our necks to peer up at the foaming torrent of the Kilefos leaping two thousand feet seemingly at a single bound, and almost wetting us with its flying spray. At one place the road is diverted, and the immense mountain is scarred from the very edge of the snows by the marring rifts of a recent avalanche, which, our driver says, was the most tremendous fall of snow and ice these parts have ever known. At last we began a steep zigzag ascent, so sharp that even H relieved the ponies of her weight. We were an hour in climbing the twelve hundred feet; and found ourselves on a wide bench overlooking the wild and lovely Naeroedal up which we had come. The sun was behind us, the half shadows of approaching twilight were creeping out from each dell and crevice. Upon our left, the gray peak of the Jordalsnut yet caught the sunshine, as also did the snow-fields of the Kaldafjeld, almost as lofty upon our right. The Naeroedal was filling with the mysterious haziness of the northern eventime. Behind us, commanding this exquisite vista, we found a monstrous and uncouth edifice, a German enterprise, the Stalheim Hotel, thrust out upon a rocky platform between two rivers plunging down on either side. Here we have been given a modern bedroom, fitted with American-looking oak furniture, have enjoyed a well-cooked German supper, sat by a blazing wood fire, and shall soon turn off the electric lights and turn in, to repose on a wire mattress, and be lulled to sleep by the musical roar of the two great waterfalls.

X

From Stalheim to Eida – The Waterfall of Skjerve Fos – The Mighty Hardanger Fjord

    Odda, Norway, September 5, 1902.

We left Stalheim by Skyd (carriage), at nine o’clock. The drive was up a desolate valley, through a scattering woodland of small firs and birches, close by the side of a foaming creek, the Naerodals Elv, hundreds of becks and brooklets bounding down the mountain sides to right and left.

After an hour’s climb, we reached a flattened summit where lay a little lake, the Opheims Vand, two or three miles long and wide, encircled with snow-fields. Here and there we passed a scattered farmstead —gaard– for every bit of land yielding any grass is here in the possession of an immemorial owner. The vand is a famed trout pool, and as we wound along its shores we passed any number of men and boys trying their luck. It was raining steadily, a cold fine downpour, and all the male population seemed to have taken to the rod.

At the lake’s far end we passed a small hotel, built in Norse style with carved and ornamented gables and painted a light green. Here in the season the English come to fish.

Leaving the vand, we began a long descent, and for twelve miles rolled down at a spanking pace, the brook by our side steadily growing until it at last became a huge and violent torrent, a furious river, the Tvinde Elv. In the fourteen miles we had descended – coasted – two thousand five hundred (2,500) feet, and now were come to the little town of Voss or Vossvangen, which lies on the banks of the Vangs Vand, a body of blue water five or six miles long and two miles wide, surrounded by one of the most fertile, well-cultivated valleys of Norway.

Vossvangen is a town of importance, and is the terminus of the railway with which the Norwegian government is connecting Bergen and Kristiania. The easiest parts of this national railway, those between Bergen and Vossvangen, and between Kristiania and Roikenvik – over which we came – are already constructed and running trains, but it is estimated that it will be twenty years before the connecting link is finally completed, for it is almost a continuous tunnel – a magnificent piece of railroad-making when it is done.

Vossvangen is also the birthplace of one of Minnesota’s most illustrious sons, United States Senator Knute Nelson. It is upon these mountains that he tended the goats and cows when a barefooted urchin, and I do not doubt that he has surreptitiously pulled many a fine trout and salmon out of the lovely lake. The people of Vossvangen accept his honors as partly[Pg 81][Pg 82] their own, and my Norwegian host gazed at me most complacently when I told him that American Senators held in their hands more power and were bigger men than any Swedish King. Norwegians are justly proud of their eminent sons who, in the great Republic over the sea, are so splendidly demonstrating the capability of the Norse race.

We put up at a modern-looking inn, called Fleischer’s Hotel, a favorite rendezvous for the English, despite its German-sounding name. Here we rested a couple of hours, and were given a well-served dinner with tender mutton and baked potatoes, big and mealy, which we ate with a little salt and abundance of delicious cream. Our hearts were here stirred with sympathy for a most unhappy-looking American girl who had evidently married a foreign husband. He was a surly, ugly-mannered man, with low brows and tangled black hair. She, poor thing, was the picture of despair, her fate being that all too common one of the American woman who, foolishly dazzled with a titled lover, too late finds him to be a titled brute.

We were to continue to Eida on the Hardanger Fjord, in the same carriage in which we set out. The ponies were well rested, and we got away a little after two o’clock. Ascending the well-tilled valley of the Rundals Elv by easy grades over a fine hard road, we crossed a marshy divide and then descended to the Hardanger Fjord. After passing the divide and coming down a few miles, we suddenly found ourselves on the rim of a vast amphitheatre into the center of which plunged a mighty waterfall, the Skjervefos, much resembling that of the Kaaterskill Falls, in the Catskill mountains of New York, only ten times as big. A roaring river here jumps sheer a thousand feet, and then again five hundred more. Yet we did not know of it until we were right on to it and into it. The falls making two great leaps, the road crosses the wild white waters between them on a wooden bridge. Over this we drove through soaking clouds of spray.

When in London we had no thought of Norway. Not until we heard from General and Mrs. C of the delights of this journey did we make up our minds to take it. We were then in Copenhagen, and neither in that town nor in Kristiania have we been able to get hold of an English-worded guide book. We are trusting to our driver’s knowledge, and to our own eyes and wits. And so it is, that we came right upon one of the most splendid waterfalls in all Norway, and never knew aught of it until chasm and flood opened at our feet. Perhaps it is better so. We have no expectations, our eyes are perpetually strained for the next turn in the road, our ears are alert for the thundering of cascades, our minds are open for astonishment and delight.

While it is a substantial modern bridge that now takes you safely over the stream which spins and spumes between the upper and the nether falls, yet our driver tells us, that in the ancient days when men and beasts must ford or swim to get across, this was dreaded as a most dangerous place. Few dared to ford, – most made a long detour. No matter how quiet or how low the waters might appear, there were yet dangers which men could not see, for water-demons hid in the black eddies and skulked in the foam. They lurked in silence until the traveler was midway the stream when they would boldly seize him by the feet, and draw him down, and ride his body exultingly through the plunging cataract below, nor did they fear also to drown what rescuer might venture in to save his friend. When now the moon is low and the night is still, may frequently be heard commingling with the leaping waters’ roar, ’tis said, the death wails of the lost souls of those whom the demons thus have drowned and delivered for torment to the cruel master-demon, Niki.

Below the giant Skjervefos we rolled alongside its Elv until we came out upon the margin of another exquisite tarn, the Gravens Vand, where, just as along the Vangsmjoesen Vand, the roadway is, much of it, hewn out in galleries at the base of overhanging cliffs. Nor is there room for carriages to pass. There are turnouts, here and there, and you pull a rope and ring a bell which warns ahead that you are coming. In some places the roadway was shored up with timbers above the profound black waters. We passed from the vand through a rocky glen down which the foaming waters hurried to the sea. We followed the stream and suddenly came out into vast breadth and distance. We were at Eida on an arm of the mighty Hardanger Fjord, the biggest earth crack in Norway.

A fresh, keen wind blew up from the ocean. A wooden pier jutted out into the deep water, where, tied to it, were several fishing smacks. A small, black-hulled steamer was there taking on freight, but it was not our boat. The sky was overcast. The long twilight was coming to an end. It would soon be dark. Across the fjord, giant black-faced precipices lifted up into the clouds and snows. Down the fjord misty headlands loomed against the dusk. The black waters were foam capped. There was a dull moan to the wind in the offing; it was a night for a storm at sea. It now grew dark. A few fitful stars shone here and there. The wind was rising. A bright light suddenly appeared toward the west. Our boat had come round the headland, and was soon at the pier. It was much like the little ship in which we sailed upon the Sogne Fjord. These fjords are alive with multitudes of just such boats, deep-set, sturdy craft, built to brave all weathers and all seas. Our course lay down the Graven Fjord, through the Uten Fjord, and then up the long, narrow Soer Fjord – arms of the Hardanger – to the hamlet of Odda, where we would again take a carriage and cross the snow-fields of the giant Haukeli mountains of the Western Alps.

Watching the sullen waters, profound and mysterious, as they churned into a white wake behind our little craft, I could scarcely credit it that I was upon the Hardanger Fjord, the greatest and most intricate of the sheltered harbors which for centuries have made the coasts of Norway the fisherman’s haven, the pirate’s home. Upon these waters the ancient Viking learned his amphibious trade. Hid in the coves which nestle everywhere along the bases of the precipices the Viking mothers hatched and reared their broods of sea-urchins, who romped with the seals and chased the mermaids and frolicked with the storms. Where I now sailed had met together again and again those fleets of war-boats, the like of which we saw the other day in Kristiania, and which went out to plunder and ravage hamlet and town and city along all the ocean coasts, even passing through the Gates of Hercules, and visiting Latin and Greek and African province with devastation and death. “Sea-wolves,” Tacitus called them, and such they were. Here gathered the hardy war-men who went out and conquered Gaul, and founded Norse rule in Normanwise where now is Normandy. Hence sailed forth the warships which harried the British Isles, and left Norse speech strong to this day on Scottish tongue and in Northumbrian mouth. Here, also, fitted out the ships, some of the crews of which it may have been who left their marks upon the New Jersey shores in Vineland, and who may even have been the sires of that strange blue-eyed, light-haired, unconquered race I saw two years ago in Yucatan, who have held the Spaniards these four centuries in check. I gazed upon the black waters of mighty Hardanger, and saw the fleets returning with their spoil, and heard the shouts of vengeance wreaked and victory won, which have so often echoed among these mountains. I was looking upon the breeding, homing waters of the greatest sea-race the world has known, and every lapping wavelet became instinct with the mystery of the cruel, splendid past.

The churning of the propeller blades now ceased. I felt a jarring of the boat. We were come to Odda and the voyage’s end.

It was ten o’clock when we made our port. A black night it had been, pitch dark, with a fierce wind and ill-tempered sea. The profound waters respond with sullen restlessness to the stress of outer tempest. Only a Norseman born and bred to these tortuous channels could have safely navigated them on such a night, and I noticed that our engines did not once slacken speed throughout the voyage!

Upon arriving at our hotel we found we were expected. A comfortable room was in readiness, and a carriage engaged for the following day and early breakfast arranged. All this had been done through telephone by our Tourists’ Agency (the Bennetts) in Kristiania. And so have we found it everywhere along our route. All Norway, every post office and nearly every farm, and especially all hotels and inns, are connected by a telephone system owned and run by the Government. Anybody in Norway can call up and talk to anybody else. We have experienced the full benefit of this efficiency.

Our entire trip has been arranged by telephone from Kristiania. We are always expected. A delicious meal, ordered from Kristiania, is always ready for us, and every landlord knows to the minute just when we will arrive, for news of us has been ’phoned ahead from the last station we have passed.

This hamlet of Odda is an important point. Here converge the two great trade and tourist routes of Western Norway. The one, the Telemarken route, crossing the Haukeli Fjeld of the Western Alps to Dalen, and thence by the Telemarken lakes and locks to Skien, and by rail to Kristiania; the other diverging at Horre, passing down the valley of the Roldals Vand to Sand and thence to Staavanger by the sea, whence ships cross to Hamburg and Bremen and the North Sea ports, and to Hull and Harwich in Britain – favorite routes by which the Germans and British enter Norway.

XI

The Buarbrae and Folgefonden Glaciers – Cataracts and Mountain Tarns – Odda to Horre

    Horre, Hotel Breifond, September 6, 1902.

To-day we have driven thirty miles from Odda, all of it up hill, except the last six miles. We started about nine o’clock with two horses, an easy carriage, and a driver whom I have had to resign to H’s more promising Danish, for he is elderly and very weak in the foreign tongue. From the first we began to climb. The driver in Norway always walks up the hills, and the male traveler also walks, while the female traveler is expected to walk, if she be able. The Norse ponies take their time, although at the end of the day they have traveled many miles and are seemingly little tired.

By the side of the smooth road rushed a river, the Aabo Elv, a mass of foam and spray which sometimes flew over us. A couple of miles farther on we came to a little dark-blue lake, the Sandven Vand, surrounded by lofty mountains, on the far side of which, almost jutting into it, pressed down the glacier of Buarbrae, descending from the snow-fields of the Folgefonden, a single expanse of ice and snow some forty miles long and ten to twenty wide, the greatest accumulation of snow and ice in western Norway. Over the precipices hemming in the vand dashed scores of cataracts and cascades, often leaping two and three thousand feet in sudden plunge. H says nobody can ever show her a waterfall again, nor talk about English Waters or Scottish Lochs.

Passing the lake, we continued to ascend, the road entering a deep and sombre gorge, which suddenly widened out into a sunlit vale, the air being filled with mists and rainbows. We were nearing the Lotefos and the Skarsfos, two of Norway’s most celebrated cataracts. Two rivers begin falling almost a mile apart, approaching as they fall, until they unite in a final leap of nearly fifteen hundred feet, a splendid spectacle, while right opposite to them tumbles the Espelandsfos, falling from similar heights. The spray and mist of the three commingle in a common cloud, and the highway passes through the eternal shower bath. As you look up you can see the entire mass of the waters from their first spring into space throughout their tumultuous, furious descent, until they eddy at your feet. Nature is so lavish here with her gigantic earth and water masses that one is perpetually awe-struck.