planted sapphire brooches upon its bosom in the great interior lakes, and spread over its shoulders the braided tresses of a hundred rivers; they have covered its mountains with diamond shields, and in their ruthless attack converted mountainous elevation into ranks of serried hills repeating the ruby pallors of the midnight sun.
Again we left Eskifiord and in our exit reviewed, as before, the steep rocky walls of the fiord, the dipping stratification, the streaming rills. Minareted summits like low parapets fenced the tops of the palisades. We passed a whale fishery with an eviscerated and skinned carcass on the dock before it, and then out over rolling waves with mist and rain, and later entered our third fiord—Nordfiord. The stormy weather was slowly succumbing to more favorable influences, and when at last the vapors rolled up into clouds we found ourselves in a deep strait between lofty walls of rock shooting out of sweeping slopes and undulating upland, which seemed in that northern sunlight, and beneath those frowning sentinels, so desolate, their austerity emphasized by a few isolated farms. One could imagine the wintry terrors of those lonely homes.
