am not. It took less than a single
day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs,
and to un-string my nerves so that I tremble at the least exertion and am
frightened at a shadow. Do you know I can scarcely look over this little
cliff without getting giddy?"

The "little cliff," upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown himself to
rest that the weightier portion of his body hung over it, while he was
only kept from falling by the tenure of his elbow on its extreme and
slippery edge--this "little cliff" arose, a sheer unobstructed precipice
of black shining rock, some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world
of crags beneath us.

Nothing would have tempted me to within half a dozen yards of its brink.
In truth, so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion
that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me,
and dared not even glance upward at the sky--while I struggled in vain to
divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were
in danger from the fury of the winds.

It was long before I could reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up
and look out into the distance.

"You must get over these fancies," said the guide; "for I have brought you
here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event
I mentioned, and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your
eye.

"We are now," he continued in that particularizing manner which
distinguished him--"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast--in the
sixty-eighth degree of latitude--in the great province of Nordland--and in
the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is
Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher--hold on to
the grass if you feel giddy--so--and look out, beyond the belt of vapor
beneath us, into the sea."

I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean whose waters wore so
inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account
of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human
imagination can conceive.

To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay
outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horribly black and
beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly
illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it its white and
ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever.

Just opposite the