But many and many a youth must have
followed this road in the evenings, going up to court his Mari or his
Kari at the saeter-hut, the same road and the same errand one generation
after another. To Peer it seemed as if all those lads now bore him
company--aye, as if he discovered in himself something of wanton youth
that had managed to get free at last.
Puh! His coat must come off and his cap go into the knapsack. Now,
as the valley sinks and sinks farther beneath him, the view across it
widens farther and farther out over the uplands beyond. Brown hills and
blue, ridges livid or mossy-grey in the setting sun, rising and falling
wave behind wave, and beyond all a great snowfield, like a sea of
white breakers foaming against the sky. But surely he had seen all this
before?
Ah! now he knew; it was the Lofoten Sea over again--with its white
foam-crested combers and long-drawn, heavy-breathing swell--a rolling
ocean turned to rock. Peer halted a moment leaning on his stick, and
his eyes half-closed. Could he not feel that same ocean-swell rising
and sinking in his own being? Did not the same waves surge through
the centuries, carrying the generations away with them upon great
wanderings? And in daily life the wave rolls us along in the old
familiar rhythm, and not one in ten thousand lifts his head above it to
ask: whither and why! Even now just such a little wave has hold of
him, taking him--whither and why? Well, the coming days might show;
meanwhile, there beyond was the sea of stone rolling its eternal cadence
under the endless sky.
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