The Sun.
London, England, 1868-09-04 00:00:00

mer, soon to deepen into burnished gold, streaming over
the water and the pine forests. On such nights
as these one is likely to forget bed altogether.
You return home in broad daylight at ten o'clock. The
children are playing in the streets till near midnight. You
enter your bedroom and find no candles, for there is no
need of them ; and if you go to bed you must sleep
without waiting for darkness. Three hours later the sun
is up again, a new day has begun, though you could not
tell when the old had ended. It is all very strange, very
glorious.
I shall not soon forget Tuesday, August 4. I have has
some experience of heat in Southern Europe, but never
have I suffered so acutely as in a Norwegian fjord, only a
few miles south of the Arctic Circle. It was hot enough
when we reached Av.lesund, a quaint fishing town close to
the open sea, but when we turned inland up the Stor Fjord
heat, whichwas great hefore,became insupportable. We were
on board an indescribably dirty steamer (I have learnt
since that the company which owned it is bankrupt, and
that new steamers will be put on next year) there was no
awning to shade us, and beneath our feet was an iron floor
that burnt the finger which touched it. The funnel vomited
forth a black rain of steam mingled with smoke, and soon
we were the colour of negroes. To make matters worse
no food was obtainable—a serious consideration in a
fourteen hours' voyage. In spite of our discomforts we
were able to see that the Stor (Great) Fjord was well
worthy of its name. Not the less did we rejoice when,
somewhere about two in the morning, we landed at Hellesylt,
and after rousing the sleepy innkeeper went supperless
as well as dinnerless to bed. The burning heat of the
previous day bad given place to a dense haze that protected
us from the sun's fiercest rays. It threw a strange, myste-
rious curtain over fiord and mountain. Here, well-nigh a
hundred miles from the open sea, we were still within the
reach of tide. Close to the mountain torrents that came
roaring down from the ice-fields there was the line of
weed to mark the gentle ebb and flow of the far-off ocean.
We took a boat and pulled some twenty
miles up a branch of the fjord to Geiranger, surely
one of the most extraordinary scenes in Europe. Straight
up from the water rise the walls of granite rock, so lofty
that even at summer noon the sun does not shine between
them. Between the tops of them and the sea—more than
2,000 ft. above you—there is not a break—not foothold fqr
a goat. Down the front, with a hiss like the steam from a
locomotive, fall the torrents, broken up into spray finer
than the finest dust, making all the air around so cold that,
while a few yards from them you are gasping in the still
heat, within the influence of them there is a cold wind that
takes away your breath with its sudden chill. Or turn to

the other side of the fjord where instead of barren
walls of rock you have mountain sides covered with
pasture or forest. There, too, the streams come tumbling
down, not falling with one leap, like a veil spread out
between earth and sky, but rolling and foaming, and
filling all the air with a noise like the sound of many
waters—

A land of streams. Some like a downward smoke
Slow dropping veils of thinnest lawn did go ;
And some through wavering lights and shadows broke
Rolling a slumberous sheet of foam below.
As we glided on hour after hour beneath that strange,
mystic light, singing snatches from Mendelssohn, Schubert,
and Mozart, or murmuring dreamy lines from Shelley,
Wordsworth, and Tennyson, with no sign of life save now
and then when some brilliant plumaged bird followed us
as though gun had never awakened the mountain echoes,
it was not difficult to believe that the Lotos land was
real land, and that we were sailing through it.