[Illustration: A CHARACTERISTIC CASCADE.]
A still more wonderful feature of Norwegian scenery is found in its imposing waterfalls. Nothing in Norway so astonished me as the unending number and variety of its cascades,—ribbons of silver, usually, in the distance, but foaming torrents close at hand. On any of these roads, halt for a moment and listen, and you will often hear a sound like that of the surf upon the shore. It is the voice of falling water.
On our journey toward the coast, during a drive of three days we counted one hundred and sixty separate falls, and eighty-six in the previous ten hours. This was an average of more than two in every fifteen minutes. True, we saw these cascades in the month of June, when snow was melting rapidly on the heights; but even in midsummer they must far outnumber those in any other part of Europe.
In fact, although familiar with the Alps, and having driven twice through all the valleys of the Pyrenees, I never knew how many waterfalls one country could possess until I went to Norway. There are, of course, magnificent falls in Switzerland, and a great number of them in the Pyrenees; but where you there see one cascade, in Norway you see twenty; and many a Norwegian cataract which would in Switzerland draw thousands of admiring tourists, and make the fortune of hotel proprietors, is here, perhaps, without a name, and certainly without renown.
On our last day's journey toward the sea, we came in sight of an extraordinary building, on which we gazed in great astonishment, for it seemed more appropriate to China than to Norway, and was apparently completely out of place in this wild, desolate ravine. It was the famous Borgund Church, a place of early Christian worship, built about eight hundred years ago. It therefore ranks (unless one other similar church be excepted) as the oldest structure in all Norway. It is so small that one could almost fancy it a church for dwarfs. Around the base is a kind of cloister, from which the dim interior receives its only light. Within is one small room, scarcely forty feet long, containing now no furniture save a rough-hewn altar. As for its various roofs and pinnacles, marked now by crosses, now by dragons' heads, nothing could be more weirdly picturesque, especially as the entire edifice is black,—in part from age, but chiefly from the coats of tar with which it has been painted for protection.