Geirangerfjord is a fifteen-kilometre arm of sea water pushed deep into the mountains of western Norway, walled on both sides by cliffs that rise up to 1,500 metres, with waterfalls running down them along its whole length and abandoned farms perched on ledges above the ships. A fjord is a valley the sea walked into: the glaciers cut the trough far below sea level, and when the ice melted the ocean poured in over the rock lip at its mouth, which is why water this narrow is this deep. The best way to see it is from the bottom. The ferry runs the full length from Hellesylt to Geiranger, and at water level between those walls even a cruise ship looks small. Halfway along, the Seven Sisters fall in seven separate threads down one wall while the single Suitor drops from the other side directly opposite; local legend reads them as a courtship, and in May and June, when the snowmelt is running, the sisters are at their loudest.
The green shelves high on the cliffs were farms. For centuries families cut hay on slopes that fell straight to the water and tied their small children to keep them off the edge; the last of them left in the early twentieth century, and their houses still stand. A fjord boat drops you at the foot of the cliff below Skageflå, silent since 1916, and a steep old path climbs to it. From above, the fjord is a different thing. The Flydalsjuvet outcrop just above Geiranger village gives the classic view down onto the water with the ships in it, and the mountain road climbs to the Dalsnibba viewing platform at 1,500 metres, from which the whole arm of water lies below like a crack in the rock. Further down the fjord system a slab of mountainside is sliding toward the water a few centimetres a year, watched day and night, because when it falls it will send a wave up this fjord. The village lives with that, at the end of the water, below the falls.