Part 18

Never before had I experienced such a sensation, not even during a terrific storm in the Atlantic Ocean, or on beholding the desert of Sahara from the pyramid of Cheops. In the latter case, I am in the vicinity of a populated district and an extensive town, and need only turn round to see Cairo’s minarets and citadel in the distance; and again at sea, the ship is a support to the eye, and I am surrounded by many people, who all participate in the very work which engages myself; I seem to a certain extent to carry my home with me. Whilst here, on the other hand, I am, as it were, torn away from everything dear to me—a speck of dust on the enormous snowdrift—and I feel my own impotence more keenly as the Nature facing me becomes grander and more gigantic, and whose forces may from inaction in an instant be called into play, bringing destruction on the fatigued wanderer. But we did not encounter them, and it is indeed an exception that any danger is incurred. With provisions for a couple of days, sure and resolute guides, enduring horses, and particularly bold courage and good temper, all will go well. As regards good temper, this is a gift of welcome and gratitude: presents from the mountains to the rare traveller who finds his way up here.

Our little caravan, a most appropriate designation, has certainly something very picturesque about it, whether looking at the travellers in their rough cloaks, slouched hats and top boots, or our little long-haired cobs with their strong sinewy limbs and close-cropped manes, or the ponies carrying our traps in a _Klöf_ saddle.

These sagacious and enduring _Klöf_ horses are certainly worth attention.

I cannot understand how they support the heavy and bulky packages they carry, covering nearly the entire body, and still less how they are able to spring, thus encumbered, so nimbly from one ledge to another and so adroitly to descend the steep, slippery mountain slopes, or so fearlessly wade through the small but deep pools—_Tjærn_—which we so often encounter on our road. The most surprising thing is that our _Klöf_ horses always prefer to be in the van, yes, even forcing their way to the front, where the path is narrowest, and the abyss at its side most appalling, and when they gain the desired position they seem to lead the entire party. What guides them in their turn? Simply the instinct with which Nature has endowed them.

Life in the mountains, and the daily intimate acquaintance with the giant forces of Nature, seem to create something corresponding in the character of the simple dwellers among the high valleys of Norway. As a type I may mention an old reindeer-hunter, whom we met in the mountains. Seventy winters had snown on his venerable locks, serving only however to ornament his proudly-borne head. Leaning on his rough but unerring rifle, motionless as a statue, he appears before us on a hill at some distance. Silent and solemn is his greeting as we pass, and we see him still yonder, motionless as the rocks, which soon hide him from our view. Thus he has to spend many a weary hour, even days, in order to earn his scanty living. To me it seemed a hard lot, but he is content—he knows no better, the world has not tempted _him_ to discontent.

Not far from the highest point on our road lies a small stone hut, tumbledown, solitary, uninviting, but nevertheless a blessed refuge to the traveller who has been caught in rough weather, and I should say that the finest hotel in Europe is scarcely entered with such feelings of grateful contentment as this wretched _Fjeldstue_ is taken possession of by the fatigued, frozen, or strayed traveller.

We were, however, lucky enough not to be in want of the refuge, as the weather became more and more lovely and the air more transparent as we ascended.

About half-way across the mountains we discovered, after some search, the horses which had been ordered to meet us here from the other side in Bergen’s Stift; and to order fresh animals to meet one half-way when crossing is certainly a wise plan, which I should recommend to every one, though I must honestly add that our horses did not appear the least exhausted in spite of their four hours’ trot yesterday and six to-day, continually ascending. In the open air we prepared and did ample justice to a simple fare, and no meal ever tasted better. And meanwhile we let our horses roam about and gather what moss they could in the mountain clefts.

After a rest of about two hours we again mount and resume our journey with renewed strength. It is still five hours’ journey to our destination on the coast.

We did not think that, after what we had already seen, a fresh grand view, even surpassing the former, would be revealed to our gaze; but we were mistaken.

Anything more grand, more impressive than the view from the last eminence, the Ocsar’s Houg, before we begin to descend, it is impossible to imagine! Before us loom the three Skagastölstinder, almost the loftiest peaks in the Scandinavian peninsula. More than seven thousand feet they raise their crests above the level of the sea, and they stand yonder as clearly defined as if within rifle-shot, whilst they are at least half a day’s journey distant. To their base no human being has ever penetrated, their top has never been trodden by man.

And they certainly appear terribly steep; snow cannot gather on their slopes, but only festoons the rocks here and there, or hides in the crevices, where the all-dispersing wind has lost its force. The mountain has a cold steel-gray color, and around the pointed cones snow-clouds move erratically, sometimes gathering in a most fantastic manner in a mass and again suddenly disappearing, as though chased by some invisible power.

And around us the dark jagged peaks of the Horungtinder, alternating with dazzling snow-fields, which increase in extent to the north, thus bespeaking their close proximity to the famous glacier of Justedalen.

Does this complete my picture? No; our glance has only swept the sun-bathed heights above, but now it is lowered, sinking with terror into yawning abysses, and lost in a gloomy depth, without outlines, without limit! A waterfall rushes wildly forward, downwards—whither? We see it not; we do not know; we can only imagine that it plunges into some appalling chasm below. In very favorable weather it is said to be possible to see the Ocean—the bottom of the abyss—quite plainly from this eminence; we could, however, only distinguish its faint outlines, as the sun shone right in our eyes. We saw, half “by faith” however, the innermost creek of the Lysterfjord. But remember this creek was rather below than before us!

“Surely it is not intended to descend into this abyss on horseback?” I ask with some apprehension. “Yes, it is,” responds my venerable guide with that inimitable, confidence-creating calmness which distinguishes the Norwegian. I involuntarily think compassionately of my neck. Perhaps the mountaineer observed my momentary surprise, as this race is gifted with remarkable keenness; perhaps not. However, I felt a slight flush on my face, and that decided me, _coûte que coûte_, never to dismount, however tempted. And of course I did not.

We had, in fact, no choice. We were bound to proceed by this road and no other, unless we desired to return all the way to Guldbrandsdalen, miss all our nicely-arranged trips around the Sogne and Nœrö fjords, and disappoint the steamer waiting for us with our carriage and traps. And above all, what an ignominious retreat! No; such a thought did not for a moment enter our head. Therefore come what may, forward!

On a balmy evening, as the rays of the setting sun tint the landscape, we find ourselves on the seashore, safe and sound.

But to attempt a description of the adventurous break-neck, giddy descent, I must decline. I can scarcely review it in my mind at this moment, when I attempt to gather the scattered fragments of this remarkable ride, the most extraordinary I ever performed. But one word I will add: one must not be afraid or subject to giddiness, else the Sogne Mountains had better be left out of the programme. Only have confidence in the mountain horse, and all will go well.

Well, had I even arrived as far as this in my journey, I would unfold to you a very different canvas, with warmer colors and a softer touch. I would, in the fertile valley of Fortun, at 62° latitude N., conjure up to your astonished gaze entire groves of wild cherry-trees laden with ripe fruit; I would show you corn, weighty and yellow three months after being sown, in close rich rows, or undulating oats ready for the sickle, covering extensive fields. I would lead you to the shore of the majestic fjord, and let you behold the towering mountains reflected sharp and clear in its depth, as though another landscape lay beneath the waves; and I would guide your glance upwards, towards the little farms nestling up there on the slope, a couple of thousand feet above your head, and which are only accessible from the valley by a rocky ladder. Yes, this and more too I would show you, but remember we stand at this moment on the crest of the mountain, and a yawning gap still divides us from the Canaan which is our journey’s end.

I have therefore no choice but to lay down my pen, and I do so with a call on you, my reader, to undertake this journey and experience for yourself its indescribable impressions; and if you do, I feel confident you will not find my description exaggerated.

Ride only once down the precipice between Optun and Lysterfjord, and you will find, I think, that the descent cannot be accurately described in words; but believe me, the memory thereof will never fade from your mind, neither will you repent the toil.

A summer’s day in the Sogne Mountains of old Norway will, as well for you as for me, create rich and charming recollections—recollections retained through one’s whole life.—_Temple Bar._

FOOTNOTES:

[4] See Virgil, _Ecl._ viii.

[5] Napier’s _Scotch Folk-lore_, p. 95.

[6] _The Folk-lore of the Northern Counties and the Border_, by W. Henderson, pp. 106, 114. Ed. 1879.

[7] Napier, p. 89.

[8] _Ibid._ p. 130.

[9] Henderson, _Border Folk-lore_, p. 35.

[10] Henderson, _Border Folk-lore_, p. 35.

[11] _Ibid._ p. 35.

[12] _Miscellanies_, p. 131. Ed. 1857.

[13] Brand’s _Pop. Antiqs._ i. p. 21.

[14] _Border Folk-lore_, pp. 114, 172, 207.

[15] Kelly’s _Indo-European Folk-lore_, p. 132.

[16] Brand, vol. i. p. 210.

[17] Kelly, p. 301.

[18] Brand, i. 292.

[19] Henderson, p. 116.

[20] Lowell has written a good sonnet on this belief. See his Poems.

[21] Cockayne’s _Saxon Leechdoms_, &c. (Rolls series), vol. ii. p. 343.

[22] _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part III. section 2.

[23] This church was originally the temple of Pythian Apollo, and stands much as it originally did.

[24] The peasants believe still that the Madonna opens gates, out of which her son issues on his daily course round the world—an obvious confusion between Christianity and the old Sun-worship.

[25] _George Eliot’s Life._ By J. W. Cross. Three volumes. Blackwood and Sons. 1885.

THE QUANDONG’S SECRET.

“Steward,” exclaimed the chief-officer of the American barque _Decatur_, lying just then in Table Bay, into which she had put on her long voyage to Australia, for the purpose of obtaining water and fresh provisions—“the skipper’s sent word off that there’s two passengers coming on board for Melbourne; so look spry and get those after-berths ready, or I guess the ‘old man’ ’ll straighten you up when he does come along.”

Soon afterwards, the “old man” and his passengers put in an appearance in the barque’s cutter; the anchor, short since sunrise, was hove up to the catheads, topsails sheeted home, and, dipping the “stars and bars” to the surrounding shipping, the _Decatur_ again, after her brief rest, set forth on her ocean travel.

John Leslie and Francis Drury had been perfect strangers to each other all their lives long till within the last few hours; and now, with the frank confidence begotten of youth and health, each knew more of the other, his failures and successes, than perhaps, under ordinary circumstances, he would have learned in a twelvemonth. Both were comparatively young men; Drury, Australian born, a native of Victoria, and one of those roving spirits one meets with sometimes, who seem to have, and care to have, no permanent place on earth’s surface, the _wandergeist_ having entered into their very souls, and taken full possession thereof. The kind of man whom we are not surprised at hearing of, to-day, upon the banks of the Fly River; in a few months more in the interior of Tibet; again on the track of Stanley, or with Gordon in Khartoum.

So it had been with Francis Drury, ever seeking after fortune in the wild places of the world; in quest, so often in vain, of a phantasmal Eldorado—lured on, ever on, by visions of what the unknown contained. Ghauts wild and rocky had re-echoed the report of his rifle; his footsteps had fallen lightly on the pavements of the ruined cities of Montezuma, sombre and stately as the primeval forest which hid them; and his skiff had cleft the bright Southern rivers that Waterton loved so well to explore, but gone farther than ever the naturalist, adventurous and daring as he too was, had ever been. At length, as he laughingly told his friend, fortune had, on the diamond fields of Klipdrift, smiled upon him, with a measured smile, ‘twas true, but still a smile; and now, after an absence of some years, he had taken the opportune chance of a passage in the _Decatur_, and was off home to see his mother and sister, from whom he had not heard for nearly two years.

Leslie was rather a contrast to the other, being as quiet and thoughtful as Drury was full of life and spirits, and had been trying his hand at sheep-farming in Cape Colony, but with rather scanty results; in fact, having sunk most of his original capital, he was now taking with him to Australia very little but his African experience.

A strong friendship between these two was the result of but a few days’ intimacy, during which time, however, as they were the only passengers, they naturally saw a great deal of each other; so it came to pass that Leslie heard all about his friend’s sister, golden-haired Margaret Drury; and often, as in the middle watches he paced the deck alone, he conjured up visions to himself, smiling the while, of what this girl, of whom her brother spoke so lovingly and proudly, and in whom he had such steadfast faith as a woman amongst women, could be like.

The _Decatur_ was now, with a strong westerly wind behind her, fast approaching the latitude of that miserable mid-oceanic rock known as the Island of St. Paul, when suddenly a serious mishap occurred. The ship was “running heavy” under her fore and main topsails and a fore topmast staysail, the breeze having increased to a stiff gale, which had brought up a very heavy sea; when somehow—for these things, even at a Board of Trade inquiry, seldom do get clearly explained—one of the two men at the wheel, or both of them perhaps, let the vessel “broach-to,” paying the penalty of their carelessness by taking their departure from her for ever, in company with binnacle, skylights, hencoops, &c., and a huge wave which swept the _Decatur_ fore and aft, from her taffrail to the heel of her bowsprit, washing at the same time poor Francis Drury, who happened to be standing under the break of the poop, up and down amongst loose spars, underneath the iron-bound windlass, dashing him pitilessly against wood and iron, here, there, and everywhere, like a broken reed; till when at last, dragged by Leslie out of the rolling, seething water on the maindeck, the roving, eager spirit seemed at last to have found rest; and his friend, as he smoothed the long fair hair from off the blood-stained forehead, mourned for him as for a younger brother.

The unfortunate man was speedily ascertained to be nothing but a mass of fractures and terrible bruises, such as no human frame under any circumstances could have survived; and well the sufferer knew it; for in a brief interval of consciousness, in a moment’s respite from awful agony, he managed to draw something from around his neck, which handing to his friend in the semi-darkness of the little cabin, whilst above them the gale roared, and shrieked, officers and men shouted and swore, and the timbers of the old _Decatur_ groaned and creaked like sentient things—he whispered, so low that the other had to bend down close to the poor disfigured face to hear it, “For Mother and Maggie; I was going to tell you about—it, and—Good-bye!” and then with one convulsive shudder, and with the dark-blue eyes still gazing imploringly up into those of his friend, his spirit took its flight.

* * * * *

The gale has abated, the courses are clewed up, topsails thrown aback, and the starry flag flies half-mast high, as they “commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption; looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.” A sudden, shooting plunge into the sparkling water, and Francis Drury’s place on earth will know him no more. Gone is the gallant spirit, stilled the eager heart for ever, and Leslie’s tears fall thick and heavy—no one there deeming them shame to his manhood—as the bellying canvas urges the ship swiftly onward on her course.

* * * * *

Only a Quandong stone, of rather unusual size, covered with little silver knobs or studs, and to one end of which was attached a stout silver chain. Leslie, as he turned it over and over in his hand, thinking sadly enough of its late owner, wondering much what he had been about to communicate when Death so relentlessly stepped in. The value of the thing as an ornament was but a trifle, and, try as he might, Leslie could find no indication that there was aught but met the eye: a simple Australian wild-peach stone converted into a trifle, rather ugly than otherwise, as is the case with so many so-called _curios_. Still, as his friend’s last thought and charge, it was sacred in his sight; and putting it carefully away, he determined on landing at Melbourne, now so near, to make it his first care to find out Drury’s mother and his sister.

* * * * *

“Drury, Drury! Let me see! Yes of course. Mother and daughter brother too sometimes; rather a wild young fellow; always ‘on the go’ some where or other, you know. Yes; they used to live here; but they’ve been gone this long time; and where to, no more than I can tell you; or I think anybody else about here either.”

So spake the present tenant of “Acacia Cottage, St. Kilda.” in response to Leslie’s inquiries at the address, to obtain which he had overhauled the effecs of the dead man, finding it at the commencement of a two-year-old letter from his mother, directed to “Algoa Bay;” finding, besides, some receipts of diamonds sold at Cape Town, and a letter of credit on a Melbourne bank for five hundred pounds; probably, so Leslie thought to himself, that “measured smile” of which the poor fellow had laughingly spoken to him in the earlier days of their brief companionship.

The above was the sum-total of the information he could ever—after many persistent efforts, including a fruitless trip to Hobart—obtain of the family or their whereabouts; so, depositing the five hundred pounds at one of the principal banking institutions, and inserting an advertisement in the _Age_ and _Argus_, Leslie having but little spare cash, and his own fortune lying still in deepest shadow, reluctantly, for a time at least, as he promised himself, abandoned the quest.

* * * * *

Kaloola was one of the prettiest pastoral homesteads in the north-western districts of Victoria; and its owner, as one evening he sat in the broad veranda, and saw on every side, far as the eye could reach, land and stock all calling him master, felt that the years that had passed since the old _Decatur_ dropped her anchor in Port Phillip had not passed away altogether in vain; and although ominous wrinkles began to appear about the corners of John Leslie’s eyes, and gray hairs about his temples, the man’s heart was fresh and unseared as when, on a certain day twelve long years ago, he had shed bitter tears over the ocean grave of his friend. Vainly throughout these latter years had he endeavored to find some traces of the Drurys. The deposit in the Bank of Australasia had remained untouched, and had by now swollen to a very respectable sum indeed. Advertisements in nearly every metropolitan and provincial newspaper were equally without result; even “private inquiry” agents, employed at no small cost, confessed themselves at fault. Many a hard fight with fortune had John Leslie encountered before he achieved success; but through it all, good times and bad, he had never forgotten the dying bequest left to him on that dark and stormy morning in the Southern Ocean; and now, as rising and going to his desk he took out the Quandong stone, and turning it over and over, as though trying once again to finish those last dying words left unfinished so many years ago, his thoughts fled back along memory’s unforgotten vale, and a strong presentiment seemed to impel him not to leave the trinket behind, for the successful squatter was on the eve of a trip to “the Old Country,” and this was his last day at Kaloola; so, detaching the stone from its chain, he screwed it securely to his watch-guard, and in a few hours more had bidden adieu to Kaloola for some time to come.

* * * * *

It was evening on the Marine Parade at Brighton, and a crowd of fashionably dressed people were walking up and down, or sitting listening to the music of the band. Amongst these latter was our old friend John Leslie, who had been in England some three or four months, and who now seemed absorbed in the sweet strains of Ulrich’s _Goodnight, my Love_, with which the musicians were closing their evening’s selection; but in reality his thoughts were far away across the ocean, in the land of his adoption; and few dreamed that the sun-browned, long-bearded, middle-aged gentleman, clothed more in accordance with ideas of comfort than of fashion, and who sat there so quietly every evening, could, had it so pleased him, have bought up half the gay loungers who passed and repassed him with many a quizzical glance at the loose attire, in such striking contrast to the British fashion of the day.

Truth to tell, Leslie was beginning to long for the far-spreading plains of his Australian home once more; his was a quiet, thoughtful nature, unfitted for the gay scenes in which he had lately found himself a passive actor, and he was—save for one sister, married years ago, and now with her husband in Bermuda—alone in the world; and he thinks rather sadly, perhaps, as he walks slowly back through the crowd of fashionables to the _Imperial_, where he is staying: “And alone most likely to the end.”