Taylor Bruce R. Lands and Peoples. The World in Color. Volume 2

Toronto, London: 1929. — 384 p.Norway (Norge), with its two thousand miles of fjord-indented coastline, is the Alaska of Europe. Trondhjem, several miles north of Oslo, is as far north as Nome, and Hammerfest as near the Arctic Circle as Point Barrow. But railroads run as far as the port of Narvik which (unlike Bering Sea) has open water the year round. The land, a rockbound plateau, furred with aromatic pines, meets the sea in cliffs over which stream the silver ribbons of countless waterfalls; while the sea reaches back into the land—sometimes for a hundred miles—with green fjords into which the arctic waters rush with high-flung spray and elemental thunder. Salt spume, weird cries of circling sea birds, and the white sails of fishing-smacks drifting out of the carmine sunsets greet the visitor to the cities of the coast. Barren mountains, rising into a barrier between Norway and Sweden, are rounded smooth from the last Glacial Period and still gleam icebound most of the year. Surging through the narrow, ice-gouged interior valleys
come snow-fed streams alive with leaping salmon.