VANITY FAIR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 150, 27 June 1931, Page 2

VANITY FAIR

ROMSDAL TALLEY. Probably nowhere, even in Norway, is there a greater number of waterfalls in a given space than along '.he Romsdal Talley. All their lives the people of that valley have the sound of falling water in their ears. Log houses with turf roofs dot the wider upper Valley, where the mountains are only beginning to close . . . Cow-bells, the inimitable smell of new-mown hay fill the air. . . . Perfect big clovers dapple the dense■l green fields; an odd variety of honeysuckle and other flowers fringe their edges. Big bushes of wild loses tempt the passer-by; pink heather climbs high up over the bluish-grey-silver of the lower rocks. There is a church here and there, isolated, as are the railway stations every five or six miles, much as :f one had been set down whereever the railway-builders thought they .had gone far enough from the last one. For there are no real towns, no centres of population, hardly room enough for villages, to say nothing of soil on which to support them, in the Romsdal Talley .... There are falls that suggest cataracts of milk from the unseen woodland pastures above; others, some targe, some thin and tenuous. . . . One of the finest and largest splits into three toward the bottom, resembl,r.g a tree with mighty roots; and the lowest of three layers of railway crosses these so closely that their spray Hecks the car windows. Above Tcrma another river comes down to join the one we had picked up just out of Dombas, forming a roaring stream that drops down into a natrow gorge of solid rock and keeps in it 'or miles, great boiling caldrons here, green caverns of mist there. . Clouds no larger than handkerchiefs are tucked in pockets of the mountains. As the eyes drop from cioft the harsh bare-stone tops soften into treed slopes, which in turn come on down more and more calm/v and placidly as they near the bottom and turn into farms.—Harry A. Franck., in "A Scandinavian Summer."