A Summer Holiday in Scandinavia

14th August. -- This morning our journey was to take us up to and past the summit of the Fille-Fjeld, and we put on slightly warmer clothing -- a precaution we found at Nystuen, our highest point, by no means unnecessary.

P. had ordered our horses rather earlier than usual, in case the station-master at Tune might be in a lazy mood, and it was important to start early; but he sent them down, for a wonder, punctually, and by eight o'clock we were off once more, doing a brisk nine miles an hour, through the fresh morning air.

Our road to Skogstad was fairly good, though rather undulating; affording us many bits of fine lake scenery, and occasional glances at waterfalls. One particularly, the Oye-foss, as our skyds-carl called it, was very fine, flashing down from a lofty plateau to the lake in three bold, sparkling leaps; each time dropping perhaps thirty feet, with much foaming of its icy cold waters.

Another waterfall -- too small in this land of cataracts to possess a special name, though well worthy of one -- I noticed on this road. It was not, indeed, a furious avalanche of foam and whirlpool like that above mentioned; but a modest little thread of silver trickling daintily from a mossy bluff at the summit of a giant rock, its lower portions fraying away into an uncertainly-defined shower of sparkling spray, which in the sunshine looked like nothing so much as diamond-studded gauze. This miniature cascade was too lovely not to deserve the distinction of a notice. We were not much impressed with Skogstad, the station at the foot of the Fille-Fjeld. It seemed rather a lonely, bleak, inhospitable place. The landlord had, however, some fine wild beasts' skins; including that of a splendid brown bear, quite lately shot, which he showed us with great pride, neatly cured, and spread out on the floor of an attic. Before we left the station we bought two silver-fox skins. In London they would have been cheap at ten shillings apiece; but we only gave the station-master one shilling and threepence for each, with which, however, he appeared delighted. After negotiating for the skins, we examined a small herd of cream-colored ponies which were grazing below the house in some water meadows. They formed the largest drove we had seen yet, and on the whole were not a badly shaped lot, though some showed traces of a life of hard work and scant food. Three of them -- sensible, conscientious animals -- were put to for us, and they were soon tugging us up the ascent of the cold and sterile Fille-Fjeld.

All vegetation soon became scarce, for the Skogstad station, though at the foot of the mountains, is itself so elevated that there are no large trees to be seen there. Sometimes, however, the hollows nourish a scanty growth of birch-bushes; but even these thinned away as we ascended, and left the view barren to the last degree. The country had indeed quite changed, and our surroundings were unlike anything we had yet seen since leaving Christiania. Nothing was visible but leagues of brown heather, broken by grey crags, and covered with the pale, yellowish-white reindeer moss; or an occasional stagnant pool, where the water from the melting snow collected and had become tinted almost blood-color by the presence of some iron element in the surrounding soil. In the far distant background, cold, blue hills showed indistinctly through white clouds and whiter sheets of snow; each hill, albeit in itself a mighty mass, being but one of many giants in the army of peaks, behind which fainter ranks of hills melted into the far distance so completely that it was difficult to say which was the vague sky-horizon and which the upheaved earth.

About half-way between Nystuen and Skogstad we crossed the summer snow line, which is here very clearly and sharply defined; the temperature getting sensibly lower as we ascended, until it was too near the freezing point to be pleasant, especially in the high wind that seems to dwell on these mountains.