86 
THROUGH NORWAY WITH THE VESEY CLUB. APRIL, 1891 . 
most marvellous blue-green colour. Crowning the line of 
cliffs is a great snowfield, from which in spring fall numerous 
avalanches, huge relics of which are still visible as we drive 
along. A few miles up the valley, just opposite to the 
entrance of another branch from the south, stands the house 
of an English resident, Mr. H. 0. Wills, one of the well- 
known firm of tobacco manufacturers, who, like his more 
famous namesake, Sir Alfred Wills, is passionately fond of 
snow-clad mountain and glacier stream. The so-called ice 
cave, at Horgheim, which is the summit* of our drive, is in 
reality an arch cut by water through the remains of an 
avalanche under a bit of lofty cliff, from which the snow-slips 
never fail to come. The arch itself is hardly worth the climb 
to it, but the views out of it and across the valley are 
delightful, and the bilberries most luscious. 
As this was our first excursion as a united party, it will be 
well here to explain our aims and methods. The west coast 
of Norway, like that of Scotland and of Ireland, is pierced 
by a number of long narrow inlets, known as fjords, the 
largest of which, Sogne Fjord, is more than 110 English 
miles long. These fjords are all narrow, varying from five or 
more miles wide at the outlet, to only a few hundred yards at 
their upper ends, where also they are repeatedly branched. 
Their shores, or banks, relatively low and water-worn at their 
mouths, get more and more lofty and precipitous as we go 
further inland, till ultimately, in the finest of them, such as 
the Greiranger Fjord, or the Naero Fjord, they are enclosed by 
vertical cliffs from three to four thousand feet in height, 
between which the direct rays of the sun, in some cases, 
never fall. It is amongst these upper arms of the Norwegian 
fjords that the finest scenery in Northern Europe is to be 
found ; and, though to the geologist or the botanist some of 
the inland fjelds are of surpassing interest, to the sightseer 
these fjords offer attractions compared with which everything 
else picturesque which the whole of Scandinavia contains 
is but as “ sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.” To the 
lover of Nature in her grander moods, to one whose ideal of 
beauty involves four elements, cliff, sky, snow, and water, I 
can do no more than strongly recommend that they should 
spend their whole time on the western fjords. They may, 
possibly, have from time to time too much of the last of the 
four elements in question, but betwixt Oddeon the Sor Fjord, 
a branch of the great Hardanger, on the south, and Veblungs- 
naes, on the north, they can have a surfeit of them all in the 
most perfect conceivable combinations. 
Our present object, then, was to see some of the finest of 
the upper arms of these fjords, and of the valleys leading 
