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.
One incident has occurred today, which I presume I may take as a high
compliment to my native tongue. One of two young Frenchmen, whose
carriage has traveled near our own, while walking ahead of his
vehicle, found the ponies disposed to walk him down. Twice this
happened. Then he waxed wroth. He suspected the tow-headed Norse
driver of not being really asleep, but of trying to even up the
ancient national grudge against his own dear France. He flew into a
Gallic passion. He stopped short. He halted the team. He awoke the
driver. He shouted in broken English, "You drive me down! You drive me
down! You vone scoundrel! I say vone damn to you, I say vone damn, I
say vone damn!"--shaking his fist in the astonished face of the
sleepy-head. After that the Norseman kept awake and the French
gentleman walked safely in the middle of the road. He evidently felt
that to swear in French would be quite lost upon the son of the
Vikings. English alone would do the job.
[Illustration: THE ESPELANDS FOS.]
[Illustration: COMMINGLING LOTE FOS AND SKARS FOS.]
We climbed for many miles a deep glen called the Seljestad Juvet; and
dined long past the hour of noon at a wayside inn, the Seljestad
Hotel. The hotel was kept by women. "Our men," they said, "are
gathering hay at the _Saeter_ (mountain farm) far up on the mountain
highlands. They are gone for a month, and will not return until the
crop is all got in." We paid our modest reckoning to a delicate,
fair-haired, blue-eyed little woman, with quiet, graceful manners,
well bred and courteous in bearing. She is the bookkeeper and business
manager of the inn, "so long as the summer season lasts," she said.
And then she sails to England in one of her father's ships, and there
becomes a governess in an English family until another summer holiday
shall come around. She had never been to America. "Some day,"
her skipper sire had "promised to take her to New York," when
they would "run over for a day" to Minneapolis to see an aunt and
cousins who were prospering, as do all Norwegians in America's
opportunity-affording air. And "Americans, she always liked to meet,"
she said, "for unlike the English, they met you so frankly and did not
condescend." She showed H all through the neat and tidy kitchen, while
a big black nanny goat stood in the doorway and watched them both.
All the afternoon we kept on climbing by the winding roadway, passing
a black-watered, snow-fed tarn, the Gors Vand, and over the
Gorssvingane pass above the snow line, where snow-fields stretched
below us, around us, above us. From the summit of 3,392 feet above
Odda and the sea, we had a superb view of all the vast Folgefond
ice-field behind us, and before us two others, the Breifond and the
Haukeli Fjeld, as vast, while 2,000 feet right down beneath us lay a
deep blue lake, the Roldals Vand.
The road now wound ten kilometers (six and one-third miles) down into
the deep valley by many successive loops, twelve of them, one-half a
mile to the loop--a feat of fine engineering, for this is a military
road. We came down on a full trot all the way, even as Ole Mon came
down the Laera Dal, until we reined in at a picturesque inn at the
vale of Horre, overlooking the valley of Roldal and its _vand_. Now we
are in a cozy hostelry, the Hotel Breifond, with a room looking out
over the exquisite deep-blue lake, encompassed by green mountains and
snow-covered summits.
[Illustration: THE GORS VAND.]
[Illustration: GLACIER OF BUARBRAE.]
Our hotel is kept by two sweet-faced elderly women, serene and
rosy-cheeked, dressed in black with immaculate white caps; one is the
widow of a daring seaman who years ago went down with his ship in a
winter gale. He was the captain and would not leave his post, though
many of the crew deserted and were saved. The other is her spinster
sister, whose betrothed lover likewise was lost at sea. In the summer
time they here harbor many anglers, who come to fish the waters of the
Roldals Vand and adjacent streams, which like most Norwegian lakes and
rivers are rented out by the local provincial or district governments.
The visitors who come here are chiefly English, the ladies tell us,
and great is their distress and often violent their objurgation at the
absence of any darkness when they may sleep. They cannot adjust
themselves to the nightless days. They are inexpressibly shocked when
they find themselves playing a game of golf or tennis at midnight, or
forgetful of the flight of time in the excitement of a salmon chase,
pausing to eat a midday snack at 2 A. M.
Our beds are the softest we have yet slept in, for both mattress and
coverlet are of eider down. The two ladies have been delighted to talk
with H in the native tongue, and have told her of their nephews and
cousins who are getting rich owning fine wheat farms in the Red River
of the North. "Come back to us in June," they say. "Our wild flowers
are then in bloom, and the hungry trout and salmon will then rise to
any fly!" And H and I resolve that in June we surely will return.
I saw one or two small pale butterflies to-day, and one gray moth at
the snow edge, where we crossed the divide; the only ones I yet have
seen. The birds, in this northland, of course, are all new to me; the
crows are gray, with black wings, heads and tails; a magpie with white
shoulders and white on head, and long, blue-black tail, is very tame;
while a bird I take to be a jay is numerous, with black body, white
shoulders and wing tips, and tail feathers edged with white. I have
seen some gray swallows which are now gathering in flocks preparatory
to going south, and several sparrows much like our field sparrows; and
sandpipers and upland plover, very small. The gray crows have a coarse
croak like a raven, "Krakers" they are called. In England we saw and
heard our only lark the day we drove from Ventnor to Cowes, on the
Isle of Wight, but I heard no other song birds in England, only once,
near Oxford, when I caught a note like our song sparrow's, while crows
and rooks swarmed everywhere from Southampton to Inverness. In Denmark
there are many storks, and I there saw the nest of one, a gigantic
mass of sticks and mud, built on the ridge of a barn, but I noticed
few other birds, except the gulls and terns along the sea. At Vang,
the other day, I saw, as I wrote you, the ptarmigan, and the
capercailzie stuffed and mounted by a Norwegian living there; they
are found on the mountains thereabouts; and a passenger, day before
yesterday, on the Sogne-fjord-boat, had in his hand half a dozen
ptarmigan, with their plumage already turning toward the winter's
white.
[Illustration: THE DESCENDING ROAD TO HORRE.]