Down o'er glaciers, landslips, screes,
Down the toppling grey moraines,
You can see, both right and left,
Straight into the tarns that slumber,
Black and sluggish, more than seven
Hundred fathoms deep below you.
Right along the Edge we two
Clove our passage through the air.
Never rode I such a colt!
Straight before us as we rushed
'Twas as though there glittered suns.
Brown-backed eagles that were sailing
In the wide and dizzy void
Half-way 'twixt us and the tarns,
Dropped behind, like motes in air.
On the shores crashed hurtling ice-floes,
But no echo reached my ears.
Only sprites of dizziness[1] sprang,
Dancing, round;—they sang, they swung,
Circle-wise, past sight and hearing!
Åse.
[Dizzy.]
Oh, God save me!
Peer.
All at once,
At a desperate, break-neck spot,
Rose a great cock-ptarmigan,
Flapping, cackling, terrified,
From the crack where he lay hidden
At the buck's feet on the Edge.
Then the buck shied half around,
- ↑ This is the poet's own explanation of this difficult passage.
"Hvirvlens vætter," he writes, is equivalent to "Svimmelhedens
ånder"—i.e., spirits of dizziness or vertigo.
