WILD NORWAY. 
CHAPTEK I 
THE LAND OF FJELD AND FJORD. 
I. Introductory. 
Norway must attract those who appreciate what is 
grand and wild. There is a boldness and a sense of 
desolation in her metamorphic mountains with their 
robe of clinging birch and prehensile pines, and in the 
infinity of those winding fjords, a tithe of which it 
would take a lifetime to explore. The traveller is 
constantly confronted with what, in our days, appear 
anachronisms in nature. I do not refer to the electric 
light in the arctic—a sort of counter-blast to the 
“ midnight sun ”—nor to telephone-wires stretched afar 
through primaeval forest, where the old-world elk still 
wanders, wondering at lustrous insulators. No; it is 
rather the sentiment that one is here face to face with 
the genesis of creation, with glacial epochs and eocene 
forms of life surviving contemporaneous and, it may 
be, in juxtaposition with later nineteenth-century con¬ 
ditions and developments. The latter, in Norway, are 
B 
