ge where we intended to stop.

But the same solitude prevailed as on the Fiord; and the silence is the
more extreme when not even the warbling of a single bird is heard to
test a particle of animal existence; and nothing meets the sight but the
blue sky, the bald heads of the mountains, and the yellow-tinted foliage
of the fir and pine. As the traveller rises from one side of a mountain
to a corner of the road, where it hurries perpendicularly down the other
side, his eye may fathom a valley several thousand feet beneath, rich in
vegetation, and surrounded on all points by rugged mountains covered
with illimitable forests of fir, through the branches of which, here and
there, the grey rocks glare, like skulls scattered over a green field;
and the whole view which is thus taken at one glance may extend before,
and on either hand of the spectator, over a space of twenty miles.

The forests are so extensive, and the chance of being lost in them is so
probable, that on our arrival in the vicinity of Krokleven, we hired a
guide. Wandering along a pleasant by-way, shaded by the overhanging
boughs of the birch, the pine, and the fir, we scaled a mountain, and
gaining its highest elevation, saw, about two thousand feet below us, an
immense lake, chequered with islands, unequal in size, on which were
farms, and on the largest small villages. Dividing its waters into two
equal parts, the road to Bergen lay no broader than a pen-knife's blade,
and twisted, far away, like a white thread round the sides of the
mountains.

From the bosom of the lake along the easy slope of this mighty valley,
the ascent of an amphitheatre of mountains, skirting the horizon, takes
the eye up to heaven; and while the sun shone brightly, on these
mountains, hoary by lapse of centuries and contention with the storm,
they seemed, although the nearest was twenty or thirty miles from us, to
be tinged with a red colour, which, contrasted with the snow on their
summits and the deep azure sky above, against which their huge forms
appeared to lean, produced a scene as difficult to delineate as it was
sublime to see.

When we had partaken of some salmon and capercaillie, cooked after the
Norwegian process--where butter abounded, and had lighted our
meerschaums, we went at a gallop homewards. Built by the road-side, many
miles apart, the only symbols of mortality to travellers in Norway, are
post-houses, stages at which the horses are generally baited, and whe