Some man heard it, and a door opened by the little light, like a square patch of brightness on the shadow of the hillside.
Then he hailed us in a great voice which echoed back to us, and one of the pilots answered him cheerily with some homely password, and we saw his form stand black against his door for a moment before he closed it, and he waved his hand to the friend whose voice he knew.
The pilot told me that it was his duty to listen for passing ships thus and hail them.

Beside his hut was piled a beacon ready to light if all was not well, and in the hut hung a great, wooden cattle lure wherewith to alarm the town.

We were close to it now.
By this time it was as if I knew the place well, so often had Gerda told me of it.

The fjord opened out from this narrow channel into a wide lake from which the mountains fell back, seamed and laced with bright streams and waterfalls, and clad with forests, amid which the cornfields were scattered wherever the rocks gave way to deeper soil.

At the head of this lake, where a swift salmon river entered the fjord, was the hall, set on rising ground above the clustering houses of the town, and looking down over them to the anchorage and the wharf for which we were making.