protected by long planks reaching from the roof and fastened at some
distance to solid blocks on the ground, forming a covered way around
each building.

During these terrible winter months the women spun and dyed the
woollen stuffs and the linen fabrics with which they clothed their
families, while the men read, or fell into those endless meditations
which have given birth to so many profound theories, to the mystic
dreams of the North, to its beliefs, to its studies (so full and so
complete in one science, at least, sounded as with a plummet), to its
manners and its morals, half-monastic, which force the soul to react
and feed upon itself and make the Norwegian peasant a being apart
among the peoples of Europe.

Such was the condition of the Strom-fiord in the first year of the
nineteenth century and about the middle of the month of May.

On a morning when the sun burst forth upon this landscape, lighting
the fires of the ephemeral diamonds produced by crystallizations of
the snow and ice, two beings crossed the fiord and flew along the base
of the Falberg, rising thence from ledge to ledge toward the summit.
What were they? human creatures, or two arrows? They might have been
taken for eider-ducks sailing in consort before the wind. Not the
boldest hunter nor the most superstitious fisherman would have
attributed to human beings the power to move safely along the slender
lines traced beneath the snow by the granite ledges, where yet this
couple glided with the terrifying dexterity of somnambulists who,
forgetting their own weight and the dangers of the slightest
deviation, hurry along a ridge-pole and keep their equilibrium by the
power of some mysterious force.