Seraphita | Page 4

funnel washed out by the sea. The passage which the waves have
forced present to the eye an image of the eternal struggle between old
Ocean and the granite rock,--two creations of equal power, one through
inertia, the other by ceaseless motion. Reefs of fantastic shape run out
on either side, and bar the way of ships and forbid 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 the waters enter it as they come down
from the forest, is called the Siegdahlen,--a word which may be held to
mean "the shedding of the Sieg,"--the river itself receiving that name.
The curving shore opposite to the face of the Falberg is the valley of

Jarvis,--a smiling scene overlooked by hills clothed with firs,
birch-trees, and larches, mingled with a few oaks and beeches, the
richest coloring of all the varied tapestries which Nature in these
northern regions spreads upon the surface of her rugged rocks. The eye
can readily mark the line where the soil, warmed by the rays of the sun,
bears cultivation and shows the native growth of the Norwegian flora.
Here the expanse of the fiord is broad enough to allow the sea, dashed
back by the Falberg, to spend its expiring force in gentle murmurs upon
the lower slope of these hills,--a shore bordered with finest sand, strewn
with mica and sparkling pebbles, porphyry, and marbles of a thousand
tints, brought from Sweden by the river floods, together with ocean
waifs, shells, and flowers of the sea driven in by tempests, whether of
the Pole or Tropics.
At the foot of the hills of Jarvis lies a village of some two hundred
wooden houses, where an isolated population lives like a swarm of bees
in a forest, without increasing or diminishing; vegetating happily, while
wringing their means of living from the breast of a stern Nature. The
almost unknown existence of the little hamlet is readily accounted for.
Few of its inhabitants were bold enough to risk their lives among the
reefs to reach the deep-sea fishing,--the staple industry of Norwegians
on the least dangerous portions of their coast. The fish of the fiord were
numerous enough to suffice, in part at least, for the sustenance of the
inhabitants; the valley pastures provided milk and butter; a certain