Note 2 — Chapter III

Those years of expectation in Bergen were busy years. Every now and then he would become homesick. In winter time he would go by the railway from Bergen to Voss,2 thence on ski over the mountains to Christiania, down the Stalheim road,2 with its sinuous twists and bends, on through Nærödal, noted for its earth slips, on by the swift Lerdals river fretting and fuming on one side, and a perpendicular mountain wall on the other. And here he would sit to rest in that narrow gorge where avalanches are of constant occurrence. Let them come! he must rest awhile and eat. A solitary wayfarer hurries by on his sleigh as fast as his horse will go. “Take care!” shouts the traveller as he passes by; and Nansen looks up, gathers his things together, and proceeds on his journey through the valley. It was Sauekilen, the most dangerous spot in Lerdals, where he was resting. Then the night falls, the moon shines brightly overhead, and the creaking sound of his footsteps follows him over the desert waste, and his dark-blue shadow stays close beside him. And he, the man possessed of ineffable pride and indomitable resolution, feels how utterly insignificant he is in that lonely wilderness of snow—naught but an insect under the powerful microscope of the starlit sky, for the far-seeing eye of the Almighty is piercing through his inmost soul. Here it avails not to seek to hide aught from that gaze. So he pours out his thoughts to Him who alone has the right to search them. That midnight pilgrimage over the snowy waste was like a divine service on ski; and it was as an invigorated man, weary though he was in body, that he knocked at the door of a peasant’s cabin, while its astonished inmates looked out in amazement, and the old housewife cried out, “Nay! in Jesus’ name, are there folk on the fjeld3 so late in the night? Nay! is it you? Suppose you are always so late on the road!”