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 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.