NOTES ON NORWEGIAN INDUSTRY 



39 



Fig. 3. Waterfall on Hundvik-fjoed. The steep walls of the fjords are 

 often lined with such waterfalls. 



houses present a very neat appearance. The roofs may be of slabs, 

 shingles, slate, some of the latter being rather great flags of mica-schist, 

 and in the poorer and older houses of turf. This turf often grows in a 

 very flourishing manner, so that quite a crop of hay could be gathered 

 from the roof. Farther south the houses are generally of the same type, 

 but in the place of logs plank are used, from three to four inches in 

 thickness. After my attention had been called to this point, I kept a 

 lookout for ordinary boards, but the thinnest I saw were by actual 

 measurement two and a half inches thick. From this almost wasteful 

 use of lumber as it would seem to us, it follows that all Norwegian 

 houses are very substantially built and one would imagine that they 

 would be of rather slow-burning construction. The contrary seems to 

 be the ease, for almost every town of any size has been repeatedly de- 

 vastated by fire, so that old houses are by no means common, indeed 

 most iSTorwegian cities have a decidedly modern appearance. The city 

 of Bergen has a number of broad avenues, purposely kept open to pre- 

 vent the spread of fires. It should be added that stone and brick are 

 rapidly replacing wood in the larger cities, much reducing the fire risk. 

 While large amounts of timber are used for building and still larger 

 quantities are exported, by far the largest amount is used for wood- 

 pulp. Here comes into use Norway's enormous water-power, for the 

 so-called mechanical pulp is most largely manufactured. All over 

 southern Norway are these pulp mills, where the wood is disintegrated 

 by rough stones, much like an ordinary mill-stone. The pulp is 



