The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

NORWEGIAN TOWNS. 129The exports of Bergen consist chiefly of fish, exchanged for colonialproduce, cereals, fruits, wine, and manufactured goods, imported mainly LyBritish vessels. Formerly all the northern fishers, even those of Lapland andthe Lofoten, brought their captures to the Bergen market, sailing hundreds ofmiles through mist and storm for the purpose.But since the foundation of Bodo,Tromso, Hammerfest, and other northern marts, these long and perilous trips haveceased.Bergen is one of the wettest spots on the globe, and leprosy, that frightfulrelic of mediaeval times, still lingers in the neighbourhood. There are about2,000 tainted by the virus, but only on the coast, the evil being apparently due toan almost exclusive diet of succulent fish.the number of victims is yearly decreasing.Thanks, however, to a better treatment,North of Bergen follow other fishing stations, such as Aalesund and Christianssund,both standing on islets at the entrance of fiords ramifying far inland. Buteast of the island of Hitteren comes the far more commodious Trondhj em-fiord,communicating seawards by a narrow and well-sheltered channel, and expandingto a wide land-locked basin, fed by many streams, and skirted by an extensivearable lowland tract. Trondhjem thus enjoys the advantage of standing on tnoverge of the natural depression separating the Kjolen from the southern tablelands,and it will also soon be connected by lines of railway, on the one hand, withChristiania, and on the other with the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia.Althoughsituated between the sixtj'-third and sixty-fourth parallels, the severity of itsclimate is tempered by the warm Atlantic breezes, and a solitary lime-tree isproudly shown to strangers as a proof of its mildness. Even farther north, nearthe village of Frosten, walnuts occasionally come to maturity.Formerly capital of the kingdom, Trondhjem still remains the religious metropolis,and in its cathedral are consecrated the Norwegian kings. This monumentof the pointed style, the finest in Norway, dates from various epochs between theend of the eleventh and beginning of the fourteenth century, and in modern timesportions destroyed by fire have been rebuilt. On a rocky eminence commandingthe city formerly stood, according to tradition, the castle of Hakon Jarl, last of theNorwegian pagan kings, of whom the saga relates that he sacrificed his own son tothe gods.In the neighbourhood some industrial villages utilise the enormous motivepower furnished by the surrounding falls and rapids ; timber is also floated downin abundance ; and a mine in the vicinity supplies the best chromate of iron in theworld. In the same district, though in the Upper Glommen basin, lies themining town of Soros, whose copper beds, containing 4 to 8 per cent, of puremetal, have been worked since the middle of the sixteenth century, partly byminers of German descent.No town worthy of the name occurs north of Trondhjem till we reach Tromso,480 miles distant as the bird flies, and at least 600 by the intricate coast-line.Tromso; Hammerfest, still farther north; Vardo, or Vardohus ; and Vads'6, onVaran ger- fiord, are the stations where the deep-sea fishing craft are equipped for