It was a proud moment when the undefeated crew
launched their "water-snake" as the Skroelings called her, on the
shining waters of a great inland sea.
The journey had been a far longer one than they expected, and to natives
of any other country would have been much more exciting than it was to
the Norsemen.[7] They had seen cliffs a thousand feet high, cataracts,
rapids, a multitude of wooded islands, narrow valleys where floating
misty clouds came and went and the sky looked like a riband. But the
precipice above Naero Fiord rises four thousand perpendicular feet, and
the water which laps its base is thousands of feet in depth. The
Skjaeggedalsfos is loftier than Niagara, and the mist-maidens dance
along the perilous pathways of a hundred Norwegian cliffs. Nils and
Thorolf agreed that the Wind-wife was right when she said that the
country of the Skroelings was like Norway but had no end.
"The trouble is," reflected Nils as he set down the day's happenings on
a birch-bark scroll, "that nobody will believe us when we tell how great
the land is."
At the end of the fifth and largest lake they found people with some
knowledge of the country beyond. It seemed that after crossing the Big
Woods one came to great open plains where a ferocious and cruel race of
warriors hunted animals as large as the moose, with hoofs and short
horns and curly brown fur.
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