scarce seen amid the foam. These trees plunge headlong into the fiord
and reappear after a time on the surface, clinging together and
forming islets which float ashore on the beaches, where the
inhabitants of a village on the left bank of the Strom-fiord gather
them up, split, broken (though sometimes whole), and always stripped
of bark and branches. The mountain which receives at its base the
assaults of Ocean, and at its summit the buffeting of the wild North
wind, is called the Falberg. Its crest, wrapped at all seasons in a
mantle of snow and ice, is the sharpest peak of Norway; its proximity
to the pole produces, at the height of eighteen hundred feet, a degree
of cold equal to that of the highest mountains of the globe. The
summit of this rocky mass, rising sheer from the fiord on one side,
slopes gradually downward to the east, where it joins the declivities
of the Sieg and forms a series of terraced valleys, the chilly
temperature of which allows no growth but that of shrubs and stunted
trees.

The upper end of the fiord, where the waters enter it as they come
down from the forest, is called the Siegdahlen,--a word which may be
held to mean "the shedding of the Sieg,"--the river itself receiving
that name. The curving shore opposite to the face of the Falberg is
the valley of Jarvis,--a smiling scene overlooked by hills clothed
with firs, birch-trees, and larches, mingled with a few oaks and
beeches, the richest coloring of all the varied tapestries which
Nature in these northern regions spreads upon the surface of her
rugged rocks. The eye can readily mark the line where the soil, warmed
by the rays of the sun, bears cultivation and shows the native growth
of the Norwegian flora. Here the expanse of the fiord is broad enough
to allow the sea, dashed back by the Falberg, to spend its expiring
force in gentle murmurs upon the lower slope of these hills,--a shore