Page:Norse mythology or, the religion of our forefathers, containing all the myths of the Eddas, systematized and interpreted with an introduction, vocabulary and index.djvu/74

 in it. Through these clefts the rivers, fed by vast glaciers upon the mountains, find their way to the sea. They come from the distance, now musically and chattingly meandering their way beneath the willows, now tumbling down the slopes, reeking and distorted by the rocks that oppose them, until they reach some awful precipice and tumble down some eight hundred to a thousand feet in a single leap into the depths below, where no human being ever yet set his foot. We are not overdrawing the picture. You cannot get to the foot of such falls as the Voring Force or Rjukan Force, but you may look over the precipice from above and see the waters pouring like fine and fleecy wool into the seething caldron, where you can discern through the vapory mists shoots of foam at the bottom, like rockets of water, radiating in every direction. You hear a low rumbling sound around you, and the very rock vibrates beneath your feet; and as you hang half giddy over the cliff, clasping your arms around some young birch-tree that tremblingly leans over the brink of the steep, and turn your eyes to the huge mountain mass that breasts you,—its black, melancholy sides seemingly within a stone's throw, and its snow-white head far in the clouds above,—your thoughts involuntarily turn to him, the God, whom the skald dare not name, to him at whose bidding Gausta Fjeld and Reeking Force sprang from Ginungagap, from the body of the giant Ymer, from chaos. You look longer upon this wonderful scene, and you begin to think of Ragnarok, of the Twilight of the gods. Once seen, and the grand picture, which defies the brush of the painter, will forever afterwards float before your mind like a dream.

Make a journey by steamer on some of those noble and magnificent fjords on the west coast of Norseland.