* "Let us fly up, let us fly up; aya!"
t This story will be told in the Sixth Dream, The Rifles.
found a nurse for her, a big strapping farm-girl named Thordis, whose young son had died, but she at length refused the labor, saying that the baby hurt her very much about the breast. - "She is already proving trouble enough," said Thjodhild. "Let us wean her now, and see how she will do." - "It will be as you will," said Eirik. "I see that." - The child lived, although she cried much in hunger and wrath. And in time she began to thrive, and grew strong and stout in the Greenland air. But that strange country in which she found herself, with its ice-breath and the spectral sky-colors, was never rigged out in stout map-sails, for even her father knew not where it began or ended. - "Some say that it extends so far as to join the regions of Tartary," writes Peyriere, reciting obediently what he has been told, "but this is uncertain, as you will hereafter perceive." As to whether it joined America, his considered answer was that he really could not say. In hopes of resolving that issue, I myself have spent many hours studying the map of Nicolo Zeno the Younger (1558), made a century and a half after the narrative that it is supposed to illustrate; but the arms of its islands are featurelessly alien, like the arms of squid.* Greenland is called there ENGRONELANDA. There is a pair of gently sloping lowlands directly opposite each other on the southeast and southwest coast, but in the main the interior of Engronelanda is nothing but white mountains crowded together. The northern regions of the islands lie at the top of the map, which says evasively: TRAMATONA. The fjords at the southern lobster-tail curve of the island bear names; these may be the names of settlements or the names of monasteries; it is hard to be sure, as they are almost illegible. The map is icy-white behind its prison-grid of longitude and latitude. On the northeast side of Engronelanda is depicted a volcano spewing its black plume of fatality above a church. (This becomes less enigmatic, if more sinister, when we recall that in the year 1308, according to Danish chronicles, there were fearful claps of thunder in Greenland, and heaven-fire fell upon the church at Skalholt, reducing it to ashes with a remorselessness in keeping with the times. This event was followed by a tempest so strong that great boulders were broken from the mountain-tops. That winter was so severe that the ice remained a year without melting.) East of the church, in the ominously featureless whiteness, the map says only: MARE ET TERRE INCOGNITE. In the middle of the ocean, southeast of Iceland, is a diamond-shaped array of crosses.
* "Of these north parts," says our Nicolo, "I have thought good to draw a copy of the saihng chart which I find that I have still amongst our family antiquities, and, although it is rotten with age, I have succeeded with it tolerably well ..."
ktf
Freydis Eiriksdotdr
"Mother, why do you hate our sister?" said Thorstein.
Thjodhild laughed bitterly. "She is not your sister, but your half-sister. I do not hate her, Thorstein, for we strive to be Christians here; we must hate no one."
For some time after this the little boy, not knowing what a half-sister was and fearing to ask, sought to see his sister naked, for he thought that she must be missing some part of her body, but this he was never able to do, and so one day he thought to ask her himself, while they gathered driftwood together. But at this Freydis burst into tears and said, "I see that I have no friend in this house." After this she would not speak to him, and kept a great deal to herself Nor, indeed, did this suit Thjodhild at all ill. Her father was sorry, and sought to cheer her when he could, but he had little time for her, as the
i farming was very rigorous in Greenland due to the severity of the climate.
j So Freydis was left alone.
I One day she was in the eastern pasture and found a carving there, a little
I figure of a seal, done in ivory. This she considered very beautiful but uncanny,
and she hid it, knowing that if her stepmother should find it she would throw it on the fire. Now she considered herself very secret and mysterious, and gave herself airs, so that Thjodhild found her difficult to bear, and struck her to make her more obedient, but the girl only laughed brazenly. She did her share of the work and more, for she was as strong as any of the three boys, but she no longer made any effi^rt to please. As time passed she became increasingly ill-tempered.
Tfie Skradin^s of Grceniand 1577
T
he history says that these savages are of a deceitful and ferocious disposition, and that they cannot be tamed, either by presents or by kindness. They are fat but active, and their skins are of an olive colour, it is believed that there are blacks among them like Ethiopians. They are dressed in seal-skins, sewn together with sinews. Their women wear their hair in disorder, and turn it behind their ears to show their faces, which are painted blue and yellow. They do not, like our women, wear petticoats, but several pairs of drawers made of the skins of fish, which they put on one over the other ... The shirts of the men and the chemises of the women are made of the intestines of fish, sewn with very fine sinews ... They are very dirty and filthy. Their tongue serves them for napkin and handkerchief, and they have no modesty about things other men are ashamed of" So says de la Peyriere.
I
The Moon andifie Sun
Justina - Abraham Zeeb's little kifak* Poor thing! She is simple-minded, but they tease her cruelly. And now she says she loves me - because theyVe told her I love her. And she's telling it about, so happily ... She can count to ten on her fingers and to twenty by taking off her kamiks and counting on her toes.
Rockwell Kent's Greenland Journal, entry for the Saturday before Christmas, 1931
We systematically spoilt the girls who worked in the house. Most of us were on very playful terms with them, and their company added considerably to the pleasures of the Base. We treated them exacdy like children, but we brought them up in the way that no children should go.
Martin Lindsay (Royal Scots Fusiliers), Those Greenland Days (1932)
Q
nee upon a time the Sun lived with her brother the Moon, and at night when the lamps were blovm out somebody came to her as she lay on her deerskins and made love to her. There were many other people who lived in the house, although they were shadowy inferior souls whose best aspiration was to become planets. In the meantime, since they had not yet decided how to chmb into the sky, they lay around the house year after year,
* Servant.
and the Sun was constantly cooking for them and the Moon had to go out hunting. - How dreary it was! Winter after winter the guests stayed, and it was always dark, and the poor Sun never learned their names, which were thin and whispery, like the puffs of breath that rose up inside the house and melted the snow-roof a little so that it dripped, dripped, throughout the dark nights and everyone must pull hides over his face to keep dry as he slept; and the guests were continually coughing and shuffling about and tinkling into the urine pot, and just when the Sun finally got to sleep her brother came in with another seal that she was required to butcher with her w/w-knife and flense the skin. Already the guests were chewing the fresh seal-liver that she had pulled out. When her work was done, she chewed a piece of meat and then blew out the lamp. The guests whisded and hissed in the darkness. The snow-roof dripped. She wrapped herself in her deerskins and waited with a bitterly beating heart. Presently the man came to her in the darkness; his heavy hand was on her breast; his hot breath was in her face, and she endured the inevitability of it. The other guests hissed and sighed all night. In the morning it was still dark, of course, and she lit the blubber lamp and stared sullenly into the guests' faces, her ov^n face puffy, unhappy; but her brother did not want her to disobey the laws of hospitality, so he sent her outside to pound the frozen blubber into oil for the lamp. When she returned, she resumed her silent study of the guests' faces. But they only laughed uneasily and stuffed meat into their mouths. Who was it that kept raping her? The dark day passed; the dark night came. She blew out the lamp, and then when no one could see her she dabbled he
r hands in the soot. She lay waiting on her deerskins. When the man came, she embraced him tightly, rubbing the soot upon his shoulders.
"One of you has soot on his shoulders," the Sun said the next morning when she lit the lamp.
"Who? Who? Who?" sighed the guests stupidly.
She made them strip off their skin shirts, but their shoulders were not dirty. As each of them exposed his shoulders to her, he sighed and became a puff of vapor. He could never become a planet now. Finally only her brother was left. He wept; he hung his head.
"Let me see you without your shirt," the sister said.
He wept; he hung his head.
"Show me your naked shoulders or I will stab you with my w/m," she said.
He wept; he hung his head.
"Strip off your shirt or I will run away into the snow," she said.
He wept; he hung his head; he stripped off his shirt, and there were sooty finger-marks on his shoulders.
Now she knew that she had always known this. And he - he could think of nothing to say or do but point to her, crying, "You have black hands, sister!"
She did not clean her hands. She sharpened her ulu; she cut off her breast and threw it into his face. "As you seem to be so fond of me, eat me, then!" she cried. (He wept; he hung his head.) She took a stick, stuck lamp-moss on it, dipped it in seal-oil and touched it to the flame of the lamp. Then she ran away into the snow. As she ran, she began rising into the air.* The Moon stood in the doorway of the house watching her as she rose up glowing and bleeding. He took his ice-scraper, skewered the lamp-moss and lit it. Then he ran after her. But his torch did not bum well. As he ran up into the sky, which was frozen and black, and rang under his feet, the flame went out. Nothing was around him but darkness; he could no longer see his sister's light, for she was too high above him. There was only a fading coal on his stick. Frantically he blew on it, and sparks flew out to become the stars. His clothes fi*oze on his back; his shoes became like horns on his feet. Ever since then we have seen his glimmering night-gleam, the roundness of his naked belly which wavers and waxes and wanes (and sometimes vanishes when he must go down to earth to hunt seals), and we see that just as he was alone on this crowded earth, he remains alone in his nights of fiery unbelief, but his sister is always bright and warm, because her lamp-moss was burning when she came up into the air. - What is it about the polar heavens that fixes a transient thing for eternity? And is the Sun happy now? Can she who lights the darkness take comfort from her own light? from his snowy face? As she ascended into that bitter darkness, was she saying to herself, "Just let me reach the sky; just let me lock myself in place while my lamp-stick bums and everything will be all right?" - Oh, Sun and Moon, how can we be happy if you came to be yourselves in this way? My own tme Sun, how long will you bleed?
* "As our habitat is the meeting of air and earth on the world," said die mathematician C. Howard Hinton in 1906, "so we must diink of the meeting place for two as affording the condition for our universe. The meeting of what two? What can diat vasmess be in die higher space which stretches in such a perfect level diat our astronomical observations fail to detect the slightest curvature?"
no The Ice-Shirt
A Relation^ Concerning the Sun and the Moon
"As far as personality goes," said Seth Pilsk the Thin, "I think the Sun and the Moon are very much Hke the River. They go on about Their business, and because They go on about Their business certain things happen. I don't know if it's all intentional or not; I have no idea. But They're there, and They give you some kind of feeling. They give me a real solid, steady feeling. I imagine that They have some intentions. The Moon is very calming, usually. Even if He's menacing He's very calming. It just happens that the Arctic in the summer has no night, so you never get the Moonlight, but the Sun is what you're aware of, always. She just goes in that tight little circle. Toward the end of my stay, She would occasionally disappear behind a higher mountain peak in the gorge of the valley."
In Praise of the Sun
Now it is to be told that as the Moon made his rounds he heard a woman's voice calling, "Brother!", and consciousness warmed him because he had her again at last amidst all this emptiness whose ice-echoes would now serve to magnify and multiply her; and in desperate hope he soared higher than ever before, rocking and wobbling like a flame in a draft - but then the woman came hurrying closer on bird-wings and said, "You are not my brother! Good!" and she began to fly away into the darkness, but his heart-scream was already shattering him, so he pleaded with her, saying, "Have you seen her? She is bleeding, and has sooty hands," to which the Bird-Woman replied in her high small voice, "Well, you drove her to it, just as my brother forced me to kill him; it is all the same!", and then he was alone again. - One does not realize how much one needs the Sun's love until She is not there. For light there is only the fog-glare and the ice-blink. The horrible cold Moon grabs you by the ankles and rubs your knees and touches your belly, and everywhere He touches you you go sad and frozen; He wants to draw you down into the ground where it is always dark; here His pale shine will be dazzling, at least to Him as He sees it reflected in the balls of your frozen eyes ...
The Air-Bridge
You who know yourself to be so stolidly solid that you do not have to worry that you might turn into anything else, ever, - how do you think
it must have been in those times of frightening transformation? We cannot call them freer. The Sun and the Moon, for instance, have never again been seen on earth. They were like butterflies seized and pressed into the moving album of some Russian aristocrat; yes, they still fly, but only when he turns their page. - So at first I thought, but when I gazed up into the sky I understood that this, too, was a simplification, for the Sun she is alive! She lives mutilated; she cut off her breast for the Moon and now must live in a bright blue waste, but nobody has killed her. As for her poor pale brother, serenely menacing, he pursues her in his unstable way, waxing and waning in melancholy persistence; he too is still himself But when you run up the air-bridge to become gods, your last mortal moment, aberrant or not, becomes the moment of butterfly-pressing. Never will she be able to forgive him. Never will he stop wanting her. Much of their light is shame-light. So in a sense the Sun and the Moon are dead.
I
Wearing ific WhiU-Shirt
1385-1987 h
It is reported that the waters about Greenland are infested with monsters, though I do not beHeve that they have been seen very frequendy.
Speculum Regale, XVI.135
o
nee upon a time Bjom the Crusader was crusading, in hopes of improving islands, souls and days, and it chanced that he came to Greenland. The old stories do not say why he came; his home was in Iceland; but then I have never understood the whims of crusaders, not being one. - It was a sunny morning, with the sun glowing behind the snowy digits of mountains, and a single yellow-and-white Danish fishing-boat pulled slowly across the fjord, looking breast-heavy with its forward cabin and its tall mast, and it turned into the harbor and vanished behind a bluff and soon its white wake had vanished, too, and once again it was half a thousand years ago and a wind blew so that a few white spiders of crevice-grass twitched between the rocks, which were black and silver, and had been set by Amortortak into the moss as if they were grave-slabs, and beautiful flies crawled on them to be sun-warmed. The rocks sloped dovm to the blue sea. Near the tide-line the moss was scattered with broken mussel-shells, and then it ended, and the rocks were slippery-green. Across the §ord were snowy cliffs, through which sky-blue patterns showed, and in front of these was a low black tongue of rock banded with snow. The color of the water changed from blue to grey and back again. The rocks ran, slimy-green and pointed, a good distance into the water, and two Skraeling children, a young sister and a brother, had gone running out on these to a skerry where there were mussels. The low
tide lulled them. They had eaten the shriveled black crowberries in the moss (which, sun-dried, taste vaguely like olives), and th
e sea was calm and there were no clouds, and the rocks were blue and black with mussels for them to eat, so that they did not heed the silent ascension of the tide that licked higher and higher until only a few bare points stuck out of the water; and when the children cried to each other and tried to run back to shore those vanished, too. They stood trapped on the skerry, waiting to be drowned in the sea; and then, when the tide was almost at its height, Bjom the Crusader saw them and rescued them, although he frankly considered them to be trolls. (He was an Icelander, and so may be forgiven his ignorance of Greenland.) -"To die that way is a death not even fit for the King of Trolls," he said to Solveig, his wife. "We will take them and put them ashore." - "Ashore?" cried Solveig sharply. "You must make them understand that they are to work for us."
The children's long black hair blew in the wind. They wore trousers with the fur side out. Their coats had fur ruffs. They smiled anxiously with white teeth and peered at Solveig through their hair. They crossed their arms; they held one another's hands. There was in their eyes a liquidly honest expression, although what it expressed she could not say. It made her uncomfortable. Nonetheless, they swore an oath of fidelity to her and him; they caught food for them; they told them that they accounted themselves as dead children, but for them. - And what clever little trolls! Bjom had but to say that his wife wanted a certain kind of meat, and they would set ofl^ for it. They had round brown faces, widening fi-om forehead to cheekbone, with shining eyes whose whites gleamed.
The Ice-Shirt Page 12
