Under the Glacier

by Halldor Laxness

  The undersigned set off along the main road in search of the metropolis that is clearly marked on the map and lies, according to the scale, about five kilometres ahead; but the road is so twisting and climbs up and down so many glacier moraines that I was five hours all told on the road there and back.

  The metropolis proved to consist of three farmsteads, standing scattered at the frontier where the cliffs end and the low-lying shore begins. In the cellar of one of the farms there was a tiny shop, and when I finally got hold of the housewife she sold me from the shop’s foodstocks some stale chocolate and tinned asparagus; and of course the celebrated Prince Polo biscuits, the only gastronomic luxury that Icelanders have allowed themselves since they became a wealthy nation. In the mouth this delicacy is not unlike the pumice one can find in dried-up riverbeds from the glacier, except for a little extra sweetness of taste that would make normal pumice rather more inedible than ever. This titbit the undersigned forced down like raw train oil, as it says in the poem about Ásmunder of Rembihnútur, for hunger was pressing hard. I sat on a grassy bank by the main road where a little brook ran past, and I had the brook along with the asparagus for dessert. The water was such that I understood at last pastor Jón Prímus’s cold water doctrine, which says that it’s quite enough to have one doctrine but not to practise it unless one is thirsty.

  If I have forgotten to write about the weather. That is soon remedied: it has cleared up. A cloudless day. The glacier reigns snowy-white and stock-still over an unordained priestling who sits on a grassy bank by a brook chewing Prince Polo biscuits, and is mentally arming himself to defend the revelation, the faith, and God’s Christianity against campers, miracle makers, horse traders, and twelve-tonner people. A good day. The day one did not lose one’s faith. How precisely symmetrical the glacier is as it lies mirrored in the water of Bárðarlaug.

  35

  Yet Another Disputation about the Same Thing

  Embi to farmer Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir in Langavatnsdalur, late that evening: For as long as I remain here at this church as the emissary of the bishop I shall not depart from what I said the other day: first we see what is in the box, and not until then do we take any decision on whether the contents should be afforded ecclesiastical treatment or not.

  Langvetningur: My teacher, who is closer to me now than ever before—he attached great importance to the box getting epagogic treatment.

  Embi: If you don’t mind, this is a Christian church.

  Langvetningur: Though I believe in cosmobiology, along with astrochemistry, biotelekinesis, and all that, it’s not because my mentor omitted to point out in his writings that the church is the home of the soul. Who would deny that the church is the horse-fair of the soul?

  Embi: Aha! When you go to a horse-fair, don’t you behave according to the rules of the horse-fair? You would scarcely buy a horse unseen. We don’t either.

  Langvetningur: My teacher summoned here three spirits who are of the opinion—and I think they have a point—that he himself kindled them into human form, just as the Finns once kindled Eyvindur Kinnrifa to life, according to Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla. This harmony-group has come here in order to start a new era in biology. You know as well as I that the rays of the galaxies are refracted in the glacier. Our bishop ought to give due consideration to our request that the soul be allowed to wake up and resurrect in a church.

  Embi: I am asking what is in the box. Nothing else matters.

  The poet Jódínus joins in the conversation, using the formal you: Though we are only ordinary people, mate, we have leave to talk, isn’t that so? We have the World Redeemers with us. Gag us if you dare.

  Langvetningur: May a farmer and horseman say a word on behalf of his mentor who lives on the planets of the galaxies though he is closer to us than we ourselves to ourselves, and looks from there with the eyes of the All-thinking and All-doing upon everything that happens in time?

  Embi: Should we not rather break open the box and have a look inside and use our own eyes as far as they go? After that we can discuss the matter.

  Farmer Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir was by God’s grace such a master at haggling over horses and bargaining over prices that his face with its space spectacles glowed in the darkness; no light was needed even at midnight when he was present, at least at this time of year. Our eyes, what are they? A legacy from the days of the monsters, the Reptile Age; relics of the shape of the leaping-lizard called Tyrannosaurus Rex, which weighed twenty tons and reared its hideous head twelve metres in the air: from that head do our eyes derive; for that reason we still lie in the prison of earthly vision from the Mesozoic era; with such eyes nothing can be perceived other than the world of this terrible creature. But, my dear bishop, there is one eye that sees: the eye that dwells deepest in universal space. That is the eye we are to meet tonight.

  Jódínus takes a pull at his pocket-bottle and turns to me: Though Helgi and I are only Icelanders, we are poets all the same and stand above the world, though that isn’t saying much. And though I’m no more than twelve tons fully laden compared with the big newt that Helgi mentioned, which was twenty tons, I was all the same entrusted with a box by a man who was perhaps as almighty as you, mate, and all you bishops. There you are, here it is; now show you aren’t afraid.

  36

  A Geophysical Drop, and So On

  A strange sound—whence came this music, which was scarcely music at all? The undersigned is standing out on the farmhouse paving in the night stillness—he thinks it safer to hang around until it’s quite certain that these men have lost the desire to go to church. Though I have in fact forbidden them the church as matters stand, I thought it rather perverse of them not to suggest I should be present when the lid of the box was opened. Here’s hoping I haven’t offended these gentlemen. So I sat down on the church step as if to look after the church, and the step still smells of new-sawn wood; then I hear this faint music coming from around the corner. The semitransparent silhouette of the glacier now looms against the sky as it listens there and waits in the stillness of the night.

  This music was like a drop that falls with three different notes, like the drops in a remote cavern. Silence in between. But the silence is of varying length and the note depends on how much the drop has gathered into itself by the time it falls from the rocky vault in the darkness. This musical drop is unique and self-sufficient in the universe while it is wearing a hole in the stone; and no ear nearby, of course. This is music in the same way as eternity is genuine in a shrunken human head. The music with which we are familiar is a gigantic monument-making inspired by national festival tendencies and pontifical mass and other deafening celebrations of despair in the style of the Ninth Symphony, but is it genuine? One can say of this drop, as a poet once elegised the shortest member of parliament: There wasn’t much material went into you, but what there was rang true. This lowly headhunter and lute-player from the Andes who has been playing for the calf at Glacier for a while—is he, when all is said and done, the one who plays the music of the absolute?

  The Langvetningur, the twelve-tonner man, and the leader of the winter-pasture shepherds (who reads books, unfortunately)—these three carried the box between them past the church door where your emissary sat perched on the step; then they went round the corner. The undersigned stood up and strolled along behind it, whatever it was.

  Embi: I prefer to be at hand even though I gather I am not invited—in case anything turns up that concerns Christianity.

  The common man Jódínus says that “such a person,” i.e., the undersigned, doesn’t deserve to be called an Icelander because Icelanders have raised ghosts since time immemorial; they learned it from the Finns. Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir on the other hand says he is glad the bishop is so gracious as to have his proxy present as a witness to a consubstantiation such as Lutherans preach (if only halfheartedly) in the Communion service, but which every twopenny priest in popedom carries out in the Roman Catholic mass every day of the year, as casu
ally as drinking water.

  I was allowed onto the veranda of the bungalow under the portico. The moon was in the second quarter.

  The sleeper Epimenides squatted on his haunches and smiled from the darkness, and sometimes there came a blue-green flash from his pupils, as in an animal. He had fastened some scurvy grass and crowberry heather in his garland, and now looked more like the gods than ever.

  The Drop sat kneeling and touched his lute with long pauses in between searching for the note that can only be sought far back in geophysics. It has been proved that there was a dry spell on earth once for 200 million years. Not a drop from the sky. No life possible. Yet the idea of water, which is the idea of life, continued to live in the deserts of the earth. Perhaps this lute-player had captured a note of the drop that went on falling in remote caverns of the Andes for 200 million years. Let us hope and pray that the music of the absolute is not just yet another variant of the Anglo-Saxon antimusic that blares out from the ghetto blasters of the world night and day.

  The one with the name Saknússemm the Second, who might unfortunately be a professor in Los Angeles, I suspect—he was trying to adopt sacred postures like Buddha, and used his poncho-blanket to conceal his obvious stiffness in Buddhism; he put on a wretched hat and pulled it down to his eyebrows. Behind him is the entrance to the bungalow, sealed by the sheriff while the legal heirs to the building have not been found anywhere in the world; I understand that the winter-pasture shepherds are no longer allowed to lay their heads anywhere now.

  For a long time it was as if nothing would happen. Are they going to sit like that, each one separate and without communication with one another, without having a ceremony or making any attempt to inspire each other, like three peering cats sitting below a wall without even caterwauling, never mind singing a hymn? But what if a mouse now emerged? Are they going to leave it to the Icelanders alone to lay bare the secrets of the universe? Or does the law of determinants consist of waiting passively for this strange thing that definitely exists and that governs infinity in time and space? Soon, however, our compatriots had begun to wield the crowbar.

  The wooden box that had guarded its contents against the glacier snows for three years looked to be about a metre long, about 25 cm in width, and about the same thickness—is there a child inside it or what? Perhaps only one leg, a kind of pars pro toto? Or else a chopped-up body like the youngsters whom Saint Nicholas of Bari of blessed memory raised from the brine-tub? The box was solidly made but the wood had got wet through after the box was removed from the glacier frost and had now for a few hours been in an air temperature of circa twelve degrees. But when the boards had been prised open, they proved to be merely an outer covering. Inside there was a container made of light-coloured metal, which looked like silver that is beginning to tarnish, but turned out to be zinc; this metal has a blue-white, rather shell-grey colour called zinc-white, which is used for coating palisander walls in kitchens.

  The zinc container now lies on the veranda and they are about to remove the lid. The undersigned could no longer keep silent at this point.

  Embi in English: Is no one going to say anything, or what? Isn’t it appropriate to recite something appropriate when there is a resurrection from the dead going on?

  After a good while the following reply came from under the hat of Saknússemm the Second: Lord Maitreya raised the three of us from nothing and not a word was spoken then.

  Whatever Lord Maitreya does, I thought it indefensible that farmer Helgi the Langvetningur of Torfhvalastaðir should not say something since the winter-pasture shepherds shrank from it.

  Embi to farmer Helgi: Aren’t you going to say something, man?

  After a little pause the farmer went to the balustrade against the semitransparent silhouette of the glacier, gold-rimmed by the moon. He raised his arms and lifted his face with its spectacles towards the galaxies and started to talk to his master, mentor, and Doctor in the jargon they were wont to use with one another: The life you asked to await you in this container until you kindled it anew with bioinduction with the help of the law of determinants: that moment has now come when you make it step forth reincarnated in astrochemical perfection and thereby change the biology of the earth. Your employees and determinanters will now take the lid off this shrine—

  37

  The Veranda, Continued: Night

  Good evening.

  Who is this mysterious good-evening-bidder who speaks thus at this time of day? The radio or what?

  On the veranda in our midst there stands a woman. She is perhaps fully middle-aged, comely, wearing a classic burberry coat and a pale blue slouch hat of hide or plastic, and holding a carrier-bag of the kind used for air travel.

  I think we are all struck dumb.

  What are you doing here? says the woman.

  I don’t suppose it’s any exaggeration to say that those present had some difficulty in answering that question. I think that we Icelanders even looked a little shamefaced, not unlike little boys who are caught pulling up turnips in someone else’s vegetable garden. But I should make the point that the winter-pasture shepherds betrayed no emotion, whether because of the radiance of thought that constantly characterizes these people, or because astrotelekinesis, cosmobiology and bioradiotherapy are typically commonplace in their eyes and require no explanation.

  But when replies were a little slow in coming from those present, the woman did not wait but walked straight to the door of the house. The sheriff’s seal on a piece of string barred the way. The woman did not even have to produce her scissors; she brushed it aside with her hand like a cobweb. Then she brought out her key-ring, searched for the right key for a moment, opened the door, went in, closed the door behind her, and was gone.

  Langvetningur: Who is that woman? Did she break the seal?

  Jódínus: Who was she? There is only one woman who opens this house.

  Langvetningur: What woman is that?

  Jódínus: I’m just a workingman and right from the start I have been paid hourly rates for keeping my mouth shut. Now I don’t open my mouth unless I get hourly rates for talking. As far as I’m concerned you can believe that this woman came down with the rain.

  Embi: What do you mean, came down with the rain? (NB: There was no reply, but in the dictionary it says this phrase is used about earthworms that rain down from the sky.)

  Langvetningur: There’s a light showing between the curtains. She has put on the lights. So it’s a human being. So it has worked!

  Jódínus: Did you think she didn’t know how to use electricity? Didn’t you know what you were raising? What does the bishop say?

  Embi: To my knowledge I wasn’t raising anything at all. I am present here as the emissary of the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs.

  Jódínus: What do these bearded mysteries from the other side of the globe say?

  They said nothing.

  The law of determinants had been at work: cosmobiology and epagogics had proved themselves, “bioinduction” had taken place, as the American puts it, using a word I have in fact been unable to find in seventeen English dictionaries but that could be everyday argot among holy men and mystic supermen in California. But such people were presumably long past giving a shout if they raise something from the dead, indeed the burning-eyed sleeper Epimenides needed to do nothing but look with those eyes of his, and a marvel occurred.

  The well-rounded woman stands bareheaded at her doorway, her face in shadow while the light streams out through the open door behind her. On second thought, the woman has doubtless thought it right to ascertain who these men were to whom she had absentmindedly bidden good evening as she was entering her house earlier.

  Woman: Do you live here, my lads?

  Langvetningur, with a big horse in his spectacles, but all the same like a little boy: We each come from different corners of the earth on account of a trifling matter. This man here is from the Andes, and the other, I understand, is from somewhere in the realm of Alexander the G
reat. But that one over there is a spiritual man from California.

  Woman: And you yourself, my dear?

  Langvetningur: Well, I’m really from so far away that no one knows any longer where my district lies and I hardly know it myself. My name is Helgi Jónsson from Torfhvalastaðir in Langvatnsdalur. I’m the man who was always looking for big horses. One day I bumped into the Master. He says to me: I shall teach you cosmobiology. At first I thought I had never heard such nonsense. I am what they call a teacher-training college man, and therefore I believe in common sense. Human-breed improvers from the galaxies, that’s simply not for horse traders. That’s another foal from a different mare, as they say. But what happened? Doesn’t the horse one least dares to believe in always prove to be the best? From that day onwards I could not think of anything else. I am like the man in the Bible who heard about a good mare, sold all his possessions, and set off and bought her. Finally I published the Master’s book at my own expense. I haven’t in fact got my money back yet, but he shall always have his reward in Christian conscience who has put the truth into print even though no one wants to read it. How do you do and be welcome, madam, I am pleased to meet you.

  Jódínus: If you don’t mind, I’m just an ordinary workingman and my name is Jódínus, but all the same I’m the one who represented the Tycoon here, responsible for all his doings. But my name is also Álfberg and I am a poet, though I’m not a modern poet and I don’t fancy these newfangled poets who can’t alliterate properly. It was I who transported the materials for all the quick-freezing plants hereabouts; it’s not my fault if they are all either subsidised or bankrupt or never even got started. Perhaps there will be a local subsidy of a million tomorrow. I also transported the palisander here for the Tycoon’s house; it is the only building at Glacier that makes a profit. I seem to remember, by the way, that we are related, my good woman, so you must excuse me for being informal with you. That milk drinker over there with the electrical apparatus for spies, he claims to be a bishop, but I’m not afraid of fellows like that. Tell the woman what your name is!