Part 21 (1/2)
”Raphaels,--lots of Raphaels.”
”I don't care for Raphaels, anyhow. I'll tell you who I like; I like Veronese.”
”Well, I'm very fond of Tintoretto.”
”I like t.i.tians; they're so delicate, don't you know?”
”Well, who's that man that's painted such dreadful things,--all mixed up, don't you know? In some places you see a good many of them.”
”You don't mean Rembrandt, do you? There are a lot of Rembrandts in Munich.”
”There was one picture I liked. I think it was a Christ; but I ain't sure. There were four children on the ground, I remember.”
When the real sunset came we were threading the rocky labyrinths of the Bergen Fjord. It is a field of bowlders, with an ocean let in; nothing more. Why the bowlders are not submerged, since the water is deep enough for big s.h.i.+ps to sail on, is the perpetual marvel; but they are not. They are as firm in their places as continents, myriads of them only a few feet out of water; and when the sun as it sinks sends a flood of gold and red light athwart them, they turn all colors, and glow on the water like great smoke crystals with fire s.h.i.+ning through. To sail up this fjord in the sunset is to wind through devious lanes walled with these jewels, and to look off, over and above them, to fields of purple and gray and green, islands on islands on islands, to the right and to the left, with the same jewel-walled lanes running east and west and north and south among them; the sky will stream with glowing colors from horizon to horizon, and the glorious silence will be broken by no harsher sound than the low lapsing of waters and the soft whirr of gray gulls' wings.
And so we came to Bergen in the bright midnight of the last of our four days.
Months afterwards Sanna sent me a few extracts from descriptions given by a Norwegian writer of some of the spots we had seen in the dim upper distances along the fjords,--some of those illuminated s.p.a.ces of green high up among the crags, which looked such sunny and peaceful homes.
Her English is so much more graphic than mine that I have begged her permission to give the extracts as she wrote them:--
”Grand, glorious, and serious is the Sogne Fjord. Serious in itself, and still more serious we find it when we know where and how people do live there between mountains. And we must wonder or ask, Is there really none places left, or no kind of work for those people to get for the maintenance of the life, but to go to such desolate and rather impa.s.sable a place?...
”More than half of the year are the two families who live on the farm of Vetti separated from all other human beings. During the winter can the usual path in the gra.s.s not be pa.s.sed in case of snow, ice, and perpetual slips, which leave behind trace long out in the summer, because the sun only for a short time came over this long enormous abyss, and does not linger there long, so that the snow which has been to ice do melt very slow, and seldom disappear earlier than in July. The short time in the winter when the river Utla is frozen may the bottom of the pa.s.s well be pa.s.sed, though not without danger, on account of the mentioned slips, which, with the power of the hurricane, are whizzing down in the deep, and which merely pressure of the air is so strong that it throw all down.
”Late in the autumn and in the spring is all approach to and from Vetti quite stopped; and late in the autumn chiefly with ground and snow slips, which then get loosened by the frequent rain. The farm-houses is situate on a steep slope, so that the one end of the lowest beam is put on the mere ground, and the other end must be put on a wall almost three yards high. The fields are so steep, and so quite near the dreadful precipice, that none unaccustomed to it do venture one's self thither; and when one from here look over the pa.s.s, and look the meadows which is more hanging than laying over the deep, and which have its gra.s.s mowed down with a short scythe, then one cannot comprehend the desperate courage which risk to set about and occupy one's self here, while the abyss has opened its swallow for receiving the foolhardy.
”A little above the dwelling-houses is a quite tolerable plain; and when one ask the man why he has not built his houses there, he answers that owing to the snow-slips it is impossible to build there.
”Through the valley-streams the Afdals River comes from the mountains, run in a distance of only twenty yards from the farm-houses, and about one hundred yards from the same pour out itself with crash of thunder in a mighty foss. The rumble of the same, and that with its hurling out caused pressure of the air, is in the summer so strong that the dwelling-houses seems to s.h.i.+ver, and all what fluids there in open vessels get placed on the table is on an incessant trembling, moving almost as on board a s.h.i.+p in a rough sea. The wall and windows which turns to the river are then always moistened of the whipped foam, which in small particles continually is thrown back from the foss.
”By the side of this foss, in the hard granite wall which it moisten, is a mined gut (the author says he can't call it a road, though it is reckoned for that), broad enough that one man, and in the highest one small well-trained horse, however not by each other's side, can walk therein. This gut, which vault is not so high that an full-grown man can walk upright, is the farm's only road which rise to a considerable height.
”But as this gut could not get lightened in a suitable height, one has filled up or finished the remaining gap with four timber beams, four or five yards long, which is close to the gut, and with its upper end leans on a higher small mountain peak, which beside this is the fastening for the bridge over the waterfall. In these beams is cut in flukes, just as the steps of a staircase, and when one walks up these flukes one looks between the beams the frothing foss beneath one's self, while one get wrapped up of its exhalation clouds.
”The man told me that the pa.s.s also is to be pa.s.sed with horse, the time of the summer, and that all then is to be carried in a pack-saddle to the farm, of his own horse, which is accustomed to this trip. And when one know the small Laerdalske horses'
easiness, and the extraordinary security wherewith they can go upon the most narrow path on the edge of the most dreadful precipices, in that they place or cast the feet so in front of each other that no path is too narrow for them, then it seems a little less surprising.
”From the Vetti farm continues the pa.s.s in a distance of about twenty-one English miles, so that the whole pa.s.s, then, is a little more than twenty-four miles, and shall on the other side of the farm be still more narrow, more difficult, and more dreadful. The farmer himself and his people must often go there to the woods, and for other things for his farm. There belongs to this farm most excellent saeter and mountain fields, wherefore the cattle begetting is here of great importance; and also the most excellent tract of firs belong to this farm.
”I was curious to know how one had to behave from here to get the dead buried, when it was impossible that two men could walk by the side of each other through the pa.s.s, and I did even not see how one could carry any coffin on horseback. I got the following information: The corpse is to be laid on a thin board, in which there is bored holes in both ends in which there is to be put handles of rope; to this board is the corpse to be tied, wrapped up in its linen cloth. And now one man in the front and one behind carry it through the pa.s.s to the farm Gjelde, and here it is to be laid into the coffin, and in the common manner brought to the churchyard. If any one die in the winter, and the bottom of the pa.s.s must be impa.s.sable then as well as in the spring and in the autumn, one must try to keep the corpse in an hard frozen state, which is not difficult, till it can be brought down in the above-mentioned manner.
”A still more strange and sad manner was used once at a cottager place called Vermelien. This place is lying in the little valley which border to the Vetti's field. Its situation by the river deep down in the pa.s.s is exceedingly horrid, and it has none other road or path than a very steep and narrow foot-path along the mountain wall side with the most dreadful precipice as by the Vetti.
”Since the cottager people here generally had changed, no one had dead there. It happened, then, the first time a boy, on seventeen years old, died. One did not do one's self any hesitation about the manner to bring him to his grave, and they made a coffin in the house. The corpse was put in the coffin, and then the coffin brought outside; and first now one did see with consternation that it was not possible to carry the corpse with them in this manner. What was to do then?
”At last they resolved to let the coffin be left as a _memento mori_, and to place the dead upon a horse, his feet tied up under the belly of the horse; against the mane on the horse was fastened a well-stuffed fodder bag, that the corpse may lean to the same, to which again the corpse was tied. And so the dead must ride over the mountain to his resting-place by Fortun's church in Lyster.”
THE KATRINA SAGA.
I.