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Was he strong and a great Angekok? and much more of the same kind. In a week the disease broke out among the children at the mission, and soon word came from islands and fjords where the Eskimos were fishing, of death and misery unspeakable. It was virgin soil for the plague, and it was terribly virulent, striking down young and old in every tent and hut.
Yasmini's blue eyes looked into hers and there was a Viking glare behind them, suggestive of the wintry fjords whence one of her royal ancestresses came. "Let him!" she said. "It would be the last of him!" Tess considered a while in silence. "When is the tournament to be?" she asked presently.
The fjords never freeze, so that navigation is always open, and there is more or less travel in midwinter between the civilized portions of the arctic regions.
Here are several broken-up ones floating about in the Waigat, a narrow strait between the island of Disco and the mainland of Greenland, and in close vicinity to several fjords noted for sending big bergs adrift in the channel way to float southward. These are the `ice- mountains' of the fancy artist.
If I remember correctly, a fine description is given of this celebrated passage by Mogge, whose graphic sketches of Norwegian scenery I had frequent occasion to admire, during my tour, for their beauty and accuracy. I fully agree with my friend Bayard Taylor, that the traveler can find no better guide to the Fjelds and Fjords of this wild country than "Afraja" and "Life and Love in Norway."
As already stated, over-population in the sterile lands of Norway, and famine probably increased by immigration from the east and south, drove its people "at times in piracy and at times in commerce" forth from the western fjords and The Vik across the North Sea to the opposite coasts of Scotland, and so to its western lochs and to Ireland, where they found cattle to slaughter on the nesses, stores of grain, and other booty.
By adopting this hypothesis, we concede that there is an intimate connection between the glacial period and a predominance of lakes, in producing which the action of ice is threefold; first, by its direct power in scooping out shallow basins where the rocks are of unequal hardness; an operation which can by no means be confined to the land, for it must extend to below the level of high water a thousand feet and more in such fjords as have been described as filled with ice in Greenland.
The general direction of the valleys is parallel to the line of the coast, intersecting the fjords at nearly a right angle, so that they, in connection with these watery defiles, divide the mountains into immense irregular blocks, with very precipitous sides and a summit table-land varying from two to four thousand feet above the sea level.
For this reason there is no continuous road in all western Norway, but alternate links of land and water boats and post-horses. The deepest fjords reach very nearly to the spinal ridge of the mountain region, and a land-road from Bergen to this line would be more difficult to construct than any of the great highways across the Alps.
The most imposing features of Norwegian scenery are its deep valleys, its tremendous gorges with their cataracts, flung like banners from steeps which seem to lean against the very sky, and, most of all, its winding, labyrinthine fjords valleys of the sea, in which the phenomena of the valleys of the land are repeated.
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