Geirangerfjord is a fifteen-kilometre arm of sea driven deep into the mountains of western Norway, and the only level ground on it is the water. The walls go up as much as 1,500 metres, and the water below them is about 250 metres deep. Ice cut this trough well under sea level, and the ocean came in over the rock lip at its mouth once the glaciers had gone. The ferry runs the whole length, Hellesylt to Geiranger, and at water level between walls like that the boat feels absurdly small. Halfway along, the Seven Sisters come down one wall in seven separate streams, and a single fall, the Suitor, drops from directly opposite. The local telling makes a courtship of it, and the sisters never married him. In May and June, with the snowmelt in them, all seven run hard; by late summer they have thinned to threads.
The Flydalsjuvet outcrop just above Geiranger gives the view everyone photographs, straight down onto the bend where the water curves out of sight between the cliffs. A mountain road climbs higher again to the Dalsnibba platform at 1,500 metres, and from there you are 1,500 metres above the arm, with the cruise ships in it reduced to specks. Further down the fjord system a slab of mountainside is creeping towards the water a few centimetres a year, watched by radar and boreholes around the clock. The day it goes in one piece it will send a wave up here. Then there are the green shelves partway up the walls, which were farms. Families cut hay on slopes that ended at a drop of several hundred metres, until rockslides and sheer isolation emptied them one by one. A fjord boat puts you at the foot of the cliff below Skageflå, silent since 1916, and a steep old path goes up to it. From the grass those families worked, the Seven Sisters come down the far wall at your own height, and the fjord is a long way under your boots.