a Scene in Bergen Stift in Norway. 305 
thing to his house, when he comes to the river he must take 
it off the horse, and letting him go loose before, he and his 
servants must carry every thing upon their backs. 
The farther we advanced in Vettie’s Giel, our road became 
the more difficult and the more frightful. At one time you 
were stopped by snow that had tumbled down, and where it 
was only by passing quickly over the loose heaps you could 
avoid sliding down the steep, at once to be dashed against the 
rocks and to be drowned : — -next you stood horrified at the sight 
of a wall of ice, the remainder of a frozen current, by which all 
farther advance seemed to be rendered impossible. But for 
this Civind had prepared himself. With his axe he cut in the 
clear solid ice a notch, in which he set one foot, then another in 
which he set his other foot, and in this manner continued to cut 
and go forward till he had reached the other side. The rest of 
us followed in the steps which he had thus cut. You must put 
on resolution ; there is nothing else for it. With the utmost 
caution, your eye fixed steadily on the point where you are to 
tread, you set forward foot by foot, without stopping to draw 
your suppressed breath. For more than half a mile (more than 
three English miles), we went forward on the brink of a per- 
fect abyss, in this manner, sometimes passing masses of snow 
not yet melted, sometimes those huge frozen mirrors which 
hung almost perpendicularly from the summit of the mountain to 
the gulph below, and over which the axe only, by steps scarcely 
a handbreadth, could form for us a dangerous path. A slip, 
an unsteady step, or giddiness itself, which always threatens to 
overwhelm the unaccustomed traveller, and in a moment the 
torrent becomes the grave of your mangled carcase. But such 
is your whole course through Vettie’s Giel, on a path where it 
is not often you can set down both feet beside each other. 
When overcome by the violence of the exertions I had to 
make, I stopped a moment. This rest, so far from being re- 
freshing to me, was full of horror. It was better to go on, 
however exhausted. In doing so, your thoughts were so occu- 
pied with the place where you might find some footing, that 
you had but little time to observe the grimaces with which death 
seemed every where to gape around you. But set yourself down, 
you cannot avoid seeing yourself sitting on the brink of an 
VOL. IX. no. 18. OCT. 1823. 
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