Rushing violently in, the sea is driven back with equal
violence by the inert force of the mountain to the opposite shore,
gently curved by the spent force of the retreating waves.
The fiord is closed at the upper end by a vast gneiss formation
crowned with forests, down which a river plunges in cascades, becomes
a torrent when the snows are melting, spreads into a sheet of waters,
and then falls with a roar into the bay,--vomiting as it does so the
hoary pines and the aged larches washed down from the forests and
scarce seen amid the foam. These trees plunge headlong into the fiord
and reappear after a time on the surface, clinging together and
forming islets which float ashore on the beaches, where the
inhabitants of a village on the left bank of the Strom-fiord gather
them up, split, broken (though sometimes whole), and always stripped
of bark and branches. The mountain which receives at its base the
assaults of Ocean, and at its summit the buffeting of the wild North
wind, is called the Falberg. Its crest, wrapped at all seasons in a
mantle of snow and ice, is the sharpest peak of Norway; its proximity
to the pole produces, at the height of eighteen hundred feet, a degree
of cold equal to that of the highest mountains of the globe.
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