celestial.

The general outline of the Strom-fiord seems at first sight to be that
of a funnel washed out by the sea. The passage which the waves have
forced present to the eye an image of the eternal struggle between old
Ocean and the granite rock,--two creations of equal power, one through
inertia, the other by ceaseless motion. Reefs of fantastic shape run
out on either side, and bar the way of ships and forbid their
entrance. The intrepid sons of Norway cross these reefs on foot,
springing from rock to rock, undismayed at the abyss--a hundred
fathoms deep and only six feet wide--which yawns beneath them. Here a
tottering block of gneiss falling athwart two rocks gives an uncertain
footway; there the hunters or the fishermen, carrying their loads,
have flung the stems of fir-trees in guise of bridges, to join the
projecting reefs, around and beneath which the surges roar
incessantly. This dangerous entrance to the little bay bears obliquely
to the right with a serpentine movement, and there encounters a
mountain rising some twenty-five hundred feet above sea-level, the
base of which is a vertical palisade of solid rock more than a mile
and a half long, the inflexible granite nowhere yielding to clefts or
undulations until it reaches a height of two hundred feet above the
water. Rushing violently in, the sea is driven back with equal
violence by the inert force of the mountain to the opposite shore,
gently curved by the spent force of the retreating waves.

The fiord is closed at the upper end by a vast gneiss formation
crowned with forests, down which a river plunges in cascades, becomes
a torrent when the snows are melting, spreads into a sheet of waters,
and then falls with a roar into the bay,--vomiting as it does so the
hoary pines and the aged larches washed down from the forests and