around with glaciers,--in short, from this vantage ground the whole
landscape whereon our simple yet superhuman drama was about to be
enacted could be seen and noted.

The winter of 1799-1800 was one of the most severe ever known to
Europeans. The Norwegian sea was frozen in all the fiords, where, as a
usual thing, the violence of the surf kept the ice from forming. A
wind, whose effects were like those of the Spanish levanter, swept the
ice of the Strom-fiord, driving the snow to the upper end of the gulf.
Seldom indeed could the people of Jarvis see the mirror of frozen
waters reflecting the colors of the sky; a wondrous site in the bosom
of these mountains when all other aspects of nature are levelled
beneath successive sheets of snow, and crests and valleys are alike
mere folds of the vast mantle flung by winter across a landscape at
once so mournfully dazzling and so monotonous. The falling volume of
the Sieg, suddenly frozen, formed an immense arcade beneath which the
inhabitants might have crossed under shelter from the blast had any
dared to risk themselves inland. But the dangers of every step away
from their own surroundings kept even the boldest hunters in their
homes, afraid lest the narrow paths along the precipices, the clefts
and fissures among the rocks, might be unrecognizable beneath the
snow.

Thus it was that no human creature gave life to the white desert where
Boreas reigned, his voice alone resounding at distant intervals. The
sky, nearly always gray, gave tones of polished steel to the ice of
the fiord. Perchance some ancient eider-duck crossed the expanse,
trusting to the warm down beneath which dream, in other lands, the
luxurious rich, little knowing of the dangers through which their
luxury has come to them. Like the Bedouin of the desert who darts