Seraphita | Page 6

white sheet far
away looked motionless as it fell into its granite cup edged for miles
around with glaciers,--in short, from this vantage ground the whole
landscape whereon our simple yet superhuman drama was about to be
enacted could be seen and noted.
The winter of 1799-1800 was one of the most severe ever known to
Europeans. The Norwegian sea was frozen in all the fiords, where, as a
usual thing, the violence of the surf kept the ice from forming. A wind,
whose effects were like those of the Spanish levanter, swept the ice of
the Strom-fiord, driving the snow to the upper end of the gulf. Seldom
indeed could the people of Jarvis see the mirror of frozen waters
reflecting the colors of the sky; a wondrous site in the bosom of these
mountains when all other aspects of nature are levelled beneath
successive sheets of snow, and crests and valleys are alike mere folds
of the vast mantle flung by winter across a landscape at once so
mournfully dazzling and so monotonous. The falling volume of the

Sieg, suddenly frozen, formed an immense arcade beneath which the
inhabitants might have crossed under shelter from the blast had any
dared to risk themselves inland. But the dangers of every step away
from their own surroundings kept even the boldest hunters in their
homes, afraid lest the narrow paths along the precipices, the clefts and
fissures among the rocks, might be unrecognizable beneath the snow.
Thus it was that no human creature gave life to the white desert where
Boreas reigned, his voice alone resounding at distant intervals. The sky,
nearly always gray, gave tones of polished steel to the ice of the fiord.
Perchance some ancient eider-duck crossed the expanse, trusting to the
warm down beneath which dream, in other lands, the luxurious rich,
little knowing of the dangers through which their luxury has come to
them. Like the Bedouin of the desert who darts alone across the sands
of Africa, the bird is neither seen nor heard; the torpid atmosphere,
deprived of its electrical conditions, echoes neither the whirr of its
wings nor its joyous notes. Besides, what human eye was strong
enough to bear the glitter of those pinnacles adorned with sparkling
crystals, or the sharp reflections of the snow, iridescent on the summits
in the rays of a pallid sun which infrequently appeared, like a dying
man seeking to make known that he still lives. Often, when the flocks
of gray clouds, driven in squadrons athwart the mountains and among
the tree-tops, hid the sky with their triple veils Earth, lacking the
celestial lights, lit herself by herself.
Here, then, we meet the majesty of Cold, seated eternally at the pole in
that regal silence which is the attribute of all absolute monarchy. Every
extreme principle carries with it an appearance of negation and the
symptoms of death; for is not life the struggle of two forces? Here in
this Northern nature nothing lived. One sole power--the unproductive
power of ice--reigned unchallenged. The roar of the open sea no longer
reached the deaf, dumb inlet, where during one short season of the year
Nature made haste to produce the slender harvests necessary for the
food of the patient people. A few tall pine-trees lifted their black
pyramids garlanded with snow, and the form of their long branches and
depending shoots completed the mourning garments of those solemn
heights.

Each household gathered in its chimney-corner, in houses carefully
closed from the outer air, and well supplied with biscuit, melted butter,
dried fish, and other provisions laid in for the seven-months winter.
The very smoke of these dwellings was hardly seen, half-hidden as they
were beneath the snow, against the weight of which they were
protected by long planks reaching from the roof and fastened at some
distance to solid blocks on the ground, forming a covered way around
each building.
During these terrible winter months the women spun and dyed the
woollen stuffs and the linen fabrics with which they clothed their
families, while the men read, or fell into those endless meditations
which have given birth to so many profound theories, to the mystic
dreams of the North, to its beliefs, to its studies (so full and so complete
in one science, at least, sounded as with a plummet), to its manners and
its morals, half-monastic, which force the soul to react and feed upon
itself and make the Norwegian peasant a being apart among the peoples
of Europe.
Such was the condition of the Strom-fiord in the first year of the
nineteenth century and about the middle of the month of May.
On a morning when the sun burst forth upon this landscape, lighting the
fires of the ephemeral diamonds produced by crystallizations of the
snow