Suspense, Volume I by Henry Seton Merriman

The _Hermione_ lay at the head of that small branch of the sea called the Heimdalfjord. This long and narrow inlet is an insignificant branch of a greater fjord where steamers ply their irregular traffic; where British tourists gaze up with weary eyes at the towering rocks and bleak cliffs; and where, during the long silent twilight winter, the winds howl and roar round the bare crags. On either side of the Heimdalfjord the gray hopeless cliffs rose a sheer two thousand feet, while the blue deep water lapped their base with scarce a ripple. The fjord lay between the mighty barriers with a solemn sense of profundity in the stillness of its bosom. One could almost picture to one's self the continuation of the steep incline into a great dark valley beneath the superficial ripple, where mighty marine growths reared their brown branches up towards the dim light, never swaying to the ocean swell -- where strange northern fishes and slow crawling things lived on unknown, unclassified.

Amid such surroundings, upon the face of so large a nature, the _Hermione_ looked incongruous. Her clean long spars, her white awning, the yellow gleam of her copper beneath the clear water, all suggested another world where comfort and small refinement live. Here all is of a rougher, larger stamp. Here man and his petty tastes are as nothing. The bleak and dismal mountains were not created for his habitation, for nothing grows there, and human ingenuity, human enterprise, can do naught with such stony chaos.