MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
29 
and witness to its excavating power not only by the mass of rocky debris 
but also by the fresh unweathered gray color, while the cliffs all about are 
brown and purple. 
Up beyond Loen Lake the valley is not unlike. The walls are steeper 
here, the scene is grander, for the upland surface is a mile above us and on it 
for three hundred and sixty square miles here rests the greatest glacier of 
Europe. There is little footing for continued human occupation, though. 
Near the lake head stood in 1904 two little settlements of Bodal and Naesdal, 
with sixty inhabitants between them. In the following winter almost 
every individual perished in a great wave from the lake, caused by the fall 
of an enormous mass of rock from the cliff above. 
Above the lake head the ground is too stony to cultivate. We may go 
up through the alders for two miles and emerge on a glacier bed which the 
ice abandoned only a few years ago. The trees end at the wall like ridge 
of stones the ice had earlier pushed before it. Upon the valley floor we now 
perceive the river winding from side to side strewing it all across with stony 
waste. Beyond, the glacier closes the valley, dull and dirty looking under 
the clouds, but glittering white when the sun bursts forth. We see then 
that there is little dirt upon it. Mostly it is white, clean ice resting on clean 
coarse gravel, with our river issuing from a blue cavern in the end. 
If now in our search for places where men may dwell we climb five thou- 
sand feet above and look across the valley of the Loen Lake to the upland, 
the midsummer landscape of snow and ice shows little promise. From the 
highest point in the region the prospect is even worse, a broad expanse of 
white picked out with rock. Such is west Norway seen from on top. Of 
such a land only the edges are usable. We saw some bits of habitation on 
the old sea bench beneath. At Froen it appears as a distinct bench on the 
landward side of one of the coast islands; dwellings and bench appear plainly. 
Outside on the ocean border where the cliffs are stripped bare by winter 
storms, a line of caves with a faint bench between marks the same ancient 
submergence of the land. It would hardly be possible to maintain life in 
a spot so exposed but just. within the entrance to the nearest fiord we find 
human dwellings in a place only better in its shelter from the ocean winds. 
They are not summer camps, but permanent homes. Further up the fiord 
is a tiny farm that seems to me the completest type of human life in west 
Norway, though there may not be many like it. 
A dike of softer rock has weathered back and formed a gully with soil on 
its floor. To right and left is only barren cliff of rock. At the water’s edge 
the boathouse, the boat moored beside it; in the middle of the narrow stripe 
of grass the dwelling, and high above the shed that serves for barn; all three 
combine to show the Norseman making the most of every scanty patch of 
earth as he clings to the edge of a rocky land, ready always to fare out upon 
the waters. 
Mark Jefferson, 
Ypsilanti, Mich., April 3, 1908. 
