I saw it not only with delight, but with complete astonishment: having
forgotten, as was too natural in all that long barrenness of ice and
sea, that anything could be so ethereally fair: yet homely, too, human,
familiar, and consoling. The air here was richly spiced with that peachy
scent, and there was a Sabbath and a nepenthe and a charm in that place
at that hour, as it were of those gardens of Hesperus, and fields of
asphodel, reserved for the spirits of the just.
Alas! but I had the glass at my side, and for me nepenthe was mixed with
a despair immense as the vault of heaven, my good God: for anon I would
take it up to spy some perched hut of the peasant, or burg of the
'bonder,' on the peaks: and I saw no one there; and to the left, at the
third marked bend of the fjord, where there is one of those watch-towers
that these people used for watching in-coming fish, I spied, lying on a
craggy slope just before the tower, a body which looked as if it must
surely tumble head-long, but did not.
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