A summer in Norway, by Edward Pellingham

An original piece of travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from a travel book published in 1881, an English traveller describes a journey by steamer along a Norwegian fjord.

The little steamer which carries the mails up the fjord leaves the quay at six o’clock on Tuesday and Friday mornings, and the traveller who misses it must wait three or four days for the next. We were on board in good time, with our rods and portmanteaus, among a crowd of farmers’ wives with baskets of eggs, a priest returning to his parish and a young English couple on their wedding tour who spoke to nobody.

For the first hour the shores were low and green, dotted with red wooden farmhouses roofed with turf, upon one of which, to my great astonishment, a goat was grazing. Then the fjord narrowed, and the mountains rose straight out of the water on either side to such a height that we had to lean back to see the snow upon their summits. The water here is said to be twelve hundred feet deep, and was so still and dark that the cliffs lay reflected in it as perfectly as in a mirror.

At every landing stage the whole population seemed to come down to meet us. The steamer did not tie up but merely stopped, while a rowing boat came out with a sack of letters, a calf or a bride, and went back with whatever we had brought.

Towards noon the captain sounded the whistle and pointed, and we saw a waterfall leaping from the cliff above us, falling so far that it turned to white smoke before it reached the fjord. The farmers’ wives did not even look up. We English, with our mouths open, must have seemed very foolish to them.

(a) At what time does the steamer leave the quay? (b) What astonished the writer on the roof of a farmhouse? (c) What does the farmers’ wives’ reaction to the waterfall suggest?