Under the Glacier

by Halldor Laxness

  Farrier: May I ask the visitor to hold the horse for a moment just while I’m finishing? We didn’t have the heart to put a muzzle-noose on him. It wouldn’t do any harm to scratch him behind the ears. Unfortunately I don’t have a horse-scratcher.

  The undersigned caught hold of the horse’s reins at the muzzle and began to scratch him behind the ear. The horse accepted this and quietened down, so the undersigned began to contemplate the glacier. In actual fact the glacier is too simple a sight to appertain to what is called beautiful, which no one knows the meaning of and by which everyone means something different from everyone else: one of those words it is safer to not use about a glacier nor anything else.

  The undersigned has never before seen this mountain glacier except from too far away, but was now about to become acquainted with it for a while. The mountain reminds one of an upturned earthenware bowl, the glazing a little bluish at times, but sometimes like gold-rimmed transparent Chinese porcelain, especially if the sun is low in the west over the sea, because then the rays play on the glacier from two directions. From here the glacier looks somewhat coarse-grained like a print that isn’t good enough; the ice is rain-sullied in many places in the lower regions, and has developed streaks like a smudged print. Probably half the snowdrifts on the glacier have yet to melt before one can say that summer has arrived. Some magnetism that I cannot yet explain draws one’s eyes towards the summit. There is a hollow on the summit, and two brilliantly white glacial crests rear upwards, bathed in an icy mesmerising light. Between these crests lies the crater into which, on the advice of the alchemist Árni Saknússemm, the party of three plunged—Professor Lidenbrock from Hamburg and his kinsman Axel, and the Icelander Hans Bjelke talking out of some dictionary or other that appears to have existed in France in the middle of the nineteenth century and could have been Swedish; and these fellows found the centre of the earth, as has been mentioned.

  Pastor Jón Prímus has finished shoeing. He straightens up, rubs his palms together to clean them, comes over to me and greets me: a tall, slim, sinewy man, begrimed with iron filings, rust, smithy soot, and lubricating oil. Through all this ingrained dirt twinkles a pair of lively eyes, blue as springwater in sunshine.

  Pastor Jón Prímus: What a way to treat visitors at Glacier— making them scratch a horse! It’s a shame I haven’t managed to get a decent horse-scratcher from Reykjavík, though I’ve tried for long enough. They’ve got nothing but plain cow-scratchers.

  The undersigned reached into his pocket and brought out the bishop’s written brief. Pastor Jón Prímus put on a pair of seamstress spectacles and read it. The letter was quite short.

  Pastor Jón Prímus: I was hoping the bishop would be coming himself. He’s a terribly agreeable chap. I always find it so enjoyable to blether with the old fellow. We don’t agree about anything. But everything depends on agreeing to disagree. I hope his rheumatism is better. But I don’t rightly know what I’m to make of you. What is your status, if I may ask?

  Embi: I tutor in arithmetic and Danish.

  Pastor Jón Prímus: I want you make the acquaintance of an eminent out-parishioner from a distant county who has come here in search of two stray horses, one red, the other grey. He has found the grey one and got news of the red one. He is my good friend Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir in Langavatnsdalur, the district officer for his area. He owns the biggest horses in the country. Do come and greet the bishop’s emissary, Helgi.

  Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir is a ruddy, red-haired man with a large honest face and a powerful gleam in his glasses; he came toward me with a sunny smile straight from outer space and said in a thin silky voice through the smile: I have always had a weakness for buying big horses. What a pleasure it would be now if one could debate with learned men and not have to go and look for horses!

  Pastor Jón: There will be plenty of time to debate with bishops, my dear Helgi, when you have found the red one.

  Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir in Langavatnsdalur (hereinafter called the Langvetningur in the text): It so happens that I have promised both the nags for a glacier trip tomorrow morning.

  Pastor Jón: I shall shoe the red one for you as well when you bring him in. But that’s all you’re getting from me. The other matter we were discussing we shan’t mention again, my friend; we shall agree to disagree on that, and be just as good friends in spite of it.

  Langvetningur: Well, I don’t need to rely on you any more, my dear pastor Jón. Now I can ask the bishop himself, who happens to be here with us, I understand, per analogiam. But while I remember, pastor Jón, what do I owe you for the shoeing?

  Pastor Jón: Let us say 25 aurar the foot per analogiam , since you brought the shoes yourself.

  Langvetningur: It’s said they have stopped minting 25-aurar pieces, pastor Jón.

  Pastor Jón: Well, come back anyway when you have found the red one.

  Langvetningur, perhaps to me, since he had argued it many a time with the pastor: As a matter of fact, we’re making a trip up the glacier to fetch a little something tomorrow morning, and it could well be that we shall need the church.

  Pastor Jón: You had better be getting on your way now, old chap, and lead not the devil into temptation, as the late pastor Jens of Setberg used to say to people.

  13

  A Highly Responsible Office

  Pastor Jón: Please excuse him for not using Latin in the right places. He is a unique person in this world. But he must not be allowed to know it. He has a theory; or more accurately, a fable. He thinks he has discovered the powder. I hope he keeps it dry. But when he says he needs the use of a church, then I say Pass and nothing will shift me from that.

  Embi: What does he want with a church?

  Pastor Jón: They are going to attempt reanimation there.

  Embi: I’m sorry, I’m rather out of my depth.

  Pastor Jón: The idea is to receive omnipotence from the galaxies. Snæfellsjökull is said to have communion. That’s all to the good. But the church they shall not get—not with my permission. Besides, it’s nailed shut.

  Embi: That reminds me, pastor Jón. Nailed shut? The church! That’s rather sad news. Who nailed this church shut? What can be done?

  Pastor Jón: The glacier stands open.

  Embi: Someone said there had been no divine service at Christmas. Is that true?

  Pastor Jón: That which is beyond words remains silent at Christmas too, my friend. But the glacier is there, all right.

  Embi: The bishop has sent me to offer assistance in solving the problems he thinks this congregation is facing.

  Pastor Jón: Few people realise the responsibility that is placed on the man who has to see to Christianity at Glacier. It is no easy matter. I was shoeing a herd of out-parish horses all night. Many people criticise me for giving hay-sweepings to alien free-range horses and shoeing out-parish herds. I ask— what is an out-parish herd and what is an in-parish herd?

  Embi: The living requirements of horses—are they so pressing that the cure of souls has to take second place?

  Pastor Jón: We know only one thing for certain about a horse: it belongs to no church parish, not baptised, not redeemed, with a drunk man on its back. And moreover, no need for it in the land now that both the drunk and the sober are driving machines. And yet people go on owning this creature to brag about it, torture it, write eulogies about it, and eat it. But it’s not enough just to torture horses and eulogise them as they do here: they have to be shod so that they can be driven to the slaughterhouse. I regard the shoeing of horses as pertaining to the cure of souls. But the church they shall not get, not even for horses.

  Embi: Perhaps the horse-owners aren’t the same as those who want communion with the galaxies?

  Pastor Jón: Yes, they are the same people.

  Embi: The bishop is gravely concerned about this situation. What can we do for you?

  Pastor Jón: Would you like to muck out the byre for me? Embi: It’s not actually in the brief. On the other hand, I was taught th
at there is no difference of degree in work, only in workmanship.

  Pastor Jón Prímus laughs like a little boy who is posing riddles for grown-ups but despises their sagacity because he knows the answers himself: I have no cow, you see. Got rid of cows long ago. But now Hnallþóra’s been given a calf.

  Embi: This calf met the undersigned on arrival last night. Pastor Jón: Didn’t you think he looks rather philosophical? Hnallþóra thinks he’ll die. I think he’ll live. Spring is on the side of calves.

  Embi: In a way, a good representative.

  Pastor Jón: Certainly closer to the Creation of the world than the parish pastor.

  Embi: I don’t doubt that a calf fulfils his role in the Creation of the world even if he’s dying of starvation. The parish pastor, on the other hand, has the role of preaching to farmers. Why does he not fulfil that role?

  Pastor Jón: Farmers have cattle and kinsfolk.

  Embi: Cattle die, kinsfolk die.

  Pastor Jón: It doesn’t matter.

  Embi: We ourselves must also die.

  Pastor Jón: Allah is Allah.

  Embi: No revelation?

  Pastor Jón: The lilies of the field.

  Embi: Yes, the lilies of the field! Exactly! Isn’t it ideal to preach about them—at Christmas, for instance?

  Pastor Jón: Oh no, better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do.

  Embi: Are you sure the flowers are silent? If a sensitive enough microphone were placed beside them?

  Pastor Jón: You are welcome to take the pulpit, young man. We’ll have the nails out of the church door in a trice.

  Embi: I can of course take the pulpit for you, since I’m supposed to be a theologian; but I don’t see how that would help matters much. I wasn’t sent here to be your curate, in fact, and besides, I am not ordained. I’m inquiring about parish life and the discharge of pastoral duties. And I have instructions to make an inspection of the church.

  Pastor Jón: Then I shall have to fetch a crowbar. But first I suggest we have a cup of coffee and some genuine Thunderer. To tell you the truth it’s a long time since I had anything to eat. Do you mind if I light my namesake, the primus?

  It would have been hardly polite to decline the hospitality of a man who was so much my superior in years and dignity. Indeed, I had already successfully withstood two tidal waves of coffee that morning along with the obligatory flotsam of sweet-cakes. Perhaps what settled it was hearing the pastor mention good honest rye bread, even though he gave it a name in keeping with his own scant orthodoxy. He went inside the shed and I watched him manipulate the primus: pour meths into the bowl, light it and wait until the burner heated up, close off the air in the container, and then start pumping the paraffin with all his might up through the glowing burner; and a violet flame formed; this was accompanied by the romantic sound of a waterfall; the whole procedure just as the parish clerk, Tumi Jónsen, had described for me in outline. The pastor had some water in a bucket, and coffee in a tin. When the water began to boil he sprinkled ground coffee haphazardly from the tin into the kettle. He stirred the foaming coffee with a file so that it wouldn’t boil over. Then he produced a handsome loaf of black pot-bread, dug into his pocket for a clasp-knife, and cut some generous slices, never less than three centimetres thick. He kept some butter in an earthenware jar among a pile of rusty scrap-iron, and said the iron kept it cold so that it didn’t melt even if the shed got hot on a summer’s day. He gouged the butter out of the jar with a chisel; nor was there anything stingy about the helping. He told me to put it on with my clasp-knife, and if I didn’t have one, to spread the butter with my finger, and he taught me the method: the right thumb is applied obliquely, that’s to say, to form an angle of nearly thirty degrees against the bread. He apologised for the fact that his hands were too dirty to do it for me himself. Then he poured coffee into two old earthenware jars that had no doubt originally contained Danish jam of the kind that was imported early this century. These jars hold nearly half a litre. From a square tin he spooned out with a putty knife an enormous quantity of brown sugar into the coffee so that it nearly brimmed over the jars, and he stirred both our mugs with a six-inch nail. We sat down again on the bench by the shed directly facing the glacier, and started swilling down this sugary-sweet kettle-coffee and biting into these thick slices with their mountains of butter the like of which one has to go to Denmark to see. Perhaps it was margarine, by the way. Or what? I don’t care; it was a marvellous feast whatever anyone says, and I couldn’t help exclaiming: What matchless bread!

  Pastor Jón Prímus: Old women all over the place keep me in pot-bread. It varies a bit actually, but it’s never downright bad; at least I never suffer any ill-effects. And this is rather a good woman we’ve got today, perhaps we’ll have her tomorrow as well. (Pointing to my shoes): What a beautiful pair of shoes you have, by the way. How much do shoes like these cost in the south nowadays?

  I guessed at the price, and he thought it high.

  Pastor Jón: But it’s a pleasure to own beautiful shoes. Once I had a beautiful pair of shoes and a girl.

  Embi: And now?

  Pastor Jón: I have the glacier, and of course the lilies of the field: they are with me, I am with them; but above all, the glacier. No wonder it infects these excellent girls around here! In the old days when I got tired I used to look forward to falling asleep with the glacier in the evenings. I also looked forward to waking up to it in the mornings. (Here the pastor smiles lyrically and looks at me.) Now I am beginning to look forward to dying from this highly responsible office and entering the glacier.

  14

  Inventory of the Parish Church at Glacier

  Vegetation. All around the church and right up to it the grass is tall, and all still withered. The lych-gate consists of weathered, rotting pieces of wood just visible above the old brittle grass. What the Edda says about the paths to houses that no one visits applies also to the path to the church. The derelict external condition of the church was described earlier; no need to elaborate further.

  Entrance. First, the threshold. This threshold as measured by the undersigned was forty-eight centimetres above ground. Cannot see how members of the congregation can gain entry into God’s House if one excepts gymnasts in the prime of life. For the reason stated, it seems that people who are lame or rheumaticky, elderly women and greybeards, would not be happy to come here. Pastor Jón says in reply that a set of steps with a few rungs must have been removed for other purposes. No one had complained about this arrangement. The steps were not missed.

  Over the church door there is a kind of gable-head or rafter made of two deal boards, for ornament and protection. This gable has been in some sort of architectural relationship with the entrance door and both were once brown, but gradually they have become colourless through decay and weathering. Door-latch out of order. The lock gone. Hinges awry, mountings rusted through. Three boards form a bar across the church door, and their ends have in fact been securely nailed to the doorposts, the idea doubtless being to prevent this double door blowing open in a storm.

  The pastor explains that the bishop himself had looked at these church doors some years ago and thought them good, at least not raised any objections, but not gone inside. Whereupon in the name of the Lord and the Forty Holy Knights, let’s try to get this church open, says pastor Jón Prímus.

  The pastor now gets busy with the claw hammer. As soon as each board is prised loose he pulls out the rusty nails and puts them in his pocket. He manages to ease the door from the doorposts even though the hinges are in poor condition. Everything creaks and groans. The inner door was painted a light colour with oak patterns, and it screeched evilly when it was opened. Dark in the church; a smell of rot and decay gushed out to meet us. The undersigned requests that the wooden shutters be torn from one or two windows, and the pastor obliges and a glimmer of daylight enters. A gust of air swept through the decaying building. The floor heaved, like a quagmire. Wa
ter has obviously got into the foundations and has rotted the floorboards. White fungus throve in the black mould-patches on the floor and ditto on the damp-stained wall panelling, which seems to have been painted blue originally.

  Altar rails (Latin gradus). The altar rails tottered on four balusters. The kneeler is meant to provide comfort for communicants when they kneel, and at one time had been upholstered with red cloth, but it is now mouldered, torn, and mouse-eaten, with the horsehair padding showing through the cloth, and it could well be that living creatures inhabit it; but insects rather than mice.

  Embi: What can have happened to the missing balusters from the altar rails?

  Pastor Jón: The children made off with them when the church was unlocked.

  Embi: And you have done nothing about it?

  Pastor Jón: They think it sport to beat cows with a nicely turned decorated stick.

  Chalice and paten. Concerning these treasures the pastor replies to the effect that thieves took away everything of that sort a long time ago. But there’s a rather clumsy old brass candlestick on the altar. If you want it, says the pastor, I shall close one eye. I myself have stolen nothing here. But I accept responsibility for the removal of the church pews.

  Church pews.

  Embi: So you have had the pews removed, pastor Jón? Pastor Jón: We were compelled to do that during the firewood shortage in the spring of the great snows. It was two hundred kilometres to the nearest lump of coal. All means of transport were immobilised right until May.

  Embi: What did the parishioners say?

  Pastor Jón: Oh, well, it was the parishioners who carried the pews away by themselves in the great snows. With my permission, in fact.