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Updated: May 27, 2025
Our road ascended gradually through half-cut woods of red pine, for two or three miles, after which it entered a long valley, or rather basin, belonging to the table land of the Dovre Fjeld. Stunted heath and dwarfed juniper-bushes mixed with a grey, foxy shrub-willow, covered the soil, and the pale yellow of the reindeer moss stained the rocks.
Their appearance is much more disgusting in summer than in winter, when the snow, to a certain extent, purifies everything. After waiting an hour or more, the herd appeared descending the fjeld, and driven toward the fold by two young Lapps, assisted by their dogs. There were about four hundred in all, nearly one-third being calves.
There never was a greater humbug than the praise of solitude: it is the fruitful mother of all evil, and no man covets it who has not something bad or morbid in his nature. By noon the central ridge or comb of the Dovre Fjeld rose before us, with the six-hundred-year old station of Jerkin in a warm nook on its southern side.
We met, however, with great numbers of travellers, mostly farmers, with laden hay-carts. It was Sunday morning, and I could not help contrasting these people with those we had seen on the same day three weeks previous whilst crossing the Fille Fjeld.
A monster wall or barrier of ice was built across a considerable stretch of land, too, by this strange irruption: "One can form some idea of the altitude of this barrier of ice when it is mentioned that from Hofdabrekka farm, which lies high up on a fjeld, one could not see Hjorleifshofdi opposite, which is a fell six hundred and forty feet in height; but in order to do so had to clamber up a mountain slope east of Hofdabrekka twelve hundred feet high."
At this elevation grain is rarely planted, though I was told potatoes and other esculents are not difficult to raise. On the left of the road, approaching the summit, lies a range of snow-capped mountains between the Dovre Fjeld and Molde; on the right a series of rocky and barren hills of sweeping outline, presenting an exceedingly desolate aspect.
The road, terribly rough and stony, crossed spurs of the hills, slowly climbing to a wild summit-level, whence we caught glimpses of lakes far below us, and the blue mountain-ranges in the west, with the pyramidal peak of the Gousta Fjeld crowning them.
Never mind, thank you, she would fix the blind in position herself. An occasional tourist came or went, Solem accompanied him across the fjeld, and he was gone. But where were all the foreigners this year? Bennett's and Cook's conducted tours, the hordes that would "do" the mountain peaks of Norway where were they? At last two solitary Englishmen turned up.
For now came disappointment, and no little one at that. Who would ever have thought it; work at the mine commenced again, true enough but at the other end of the fjeld, eight miles away, on the southern boundary of Geissler's holding, far off in another district altogether, a district with which they were in no way concerned.
No, they were discontinuing their preliminary operations for a while, only for a short time; they had seen what the place was like, what it could produce; then they could build their aerial railway and get to work on the southern side of the fjeld. He turned to Isak: "You don't happen to know where this Geissler's got to?" "No." Well, no matter they'd get hold of him all right.
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