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158 THROUGH NORWAY WITII A KNAPSACK.
river diminishes as the valley is ascended. The walls
of these terraces are in some parts nearly perpendicular,
and are evidently the cuttings made by the river which
flowrs at the foot of these precipitous slopes. It appears
that all the valleys opening into the sea at this part of
Norway are alike in this respect, and thus afford
evidence of an upheaval of the whole of this region to
a height of some 500 to 600 feet. This lifting of the
mountains and their sea-filled valleys has occurred at what
geologists call a recent period; probably at about the
time when Cheapside, St. Paul’s Churchyard, Belgravia,
and all the rest of the land on which the world’s
metropolis now stands, formed the bed of a quiet lake; when
England, Scotland, and Wales were one cluster of small
islands, and Ireland another; and when the soil out of
which the plodding peasantry of France are now
extracting the sweet juices that we sip in claret and
champagne, was being deposited under the waters of a
shallow sea.
Whether it was the same great heaving of the earth
that lifted the Alps from a moderate elevation to their
present towering heights—that raised sea-shells to the
summit of Mont Pilatus, and formed the Righi and the
Rossberg out of the cemented pebbles of a shingle beach
—that carried upwards with it all the sloping plains of
France, and united our scattered archipelago into the
two islands ; or whether there was another independent
centre of upheaval for the north, which exerted its
greatest energy at Iceland, and then lifted the
sea-bottom to the surface with such sharp and abrupt action
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