Well, I coasted Norway for nearly a hundred and sixty miles without once
going nearer land than two or three miles: for something held me back.
But passing the fjord-mouth where I knew that Aadheim was, I suddenly
turned the helm to port, almost before I knew that I was doing it, and
made for land.
In half an hour I was moving up an opening in the land with mountains on
either hand, streaky crags at their summit, umbrageous boscage below;
and the whole softened, as it were, by veils woven of the rainbow.
This arm of water lies curved about like a thread which one drops, only
the curves are much more pointed, so that every few minutes the scene
was changed, though the vessel just crawled her way up, and I could see
behind me nothing of what was passed, or only a land-locked gleam like a
lake.
I never saw water so polished and glassy, like clarid polished marble,
reflecting everything quite clean-cut in its lucid abysm, over which
hardly the faintest zephyr breathed that still sun-down; it wimpled
about the bluff _Boreal_, which seemed to move as if careful not to
bruise it, in rich wrinkles and creases, like glycerine, or
dewy-trickling lotus-oil; yet it was only the sea: and the spectacle
yonder was only crags, and autumn-foliage and mountain-slope: yet all
seemed caught-up and chaste, rapt in a trance of rose and purple, and
made of the stuff of dreams and bubbles, of pollen-of-flowers, and rinds
of the peach.
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