It’s safer not to go off the road now, said the man who filled our petrol tank; it’s not good for walking now.
We hadn’t been driving long before the fog poured over us, at first dry as dust but soon becoming dank. Within a short time there was a fine drizzle, then a mizzle with a cold breeze off the sea. The woman had to speed up the wipers so that they could manage to keep the moisture off the windscreen. It got darker, and she switched on the lights. Then I noticed that the clock on the instrument panel was nearly twelve, but I wasn’t entirely clear for a moment whether it was midday or midnight; nor indeed did it matter very much.
The woman made no noticeable effort to get out of this hellish fog quickly. If anything, she drove with even greater caution than before, and she kept a particularly close watch to the seaward side on the right, as if she were expecting something from that direction. Every now and again she pulled up on the road, wound down the window, and peered out into the fog. Every time she came to a crossing she got out and inspected the turning-off even though it was only an insignificant path. I asked what she was looking for, but she made no reply. Thus we groped our way slowly through the drizzle far into the night.
After many attempts at establishing her position she finally found an insignificant side road that formed a right angle with the main road to the right. It was on sandy gravel. This side road, if it could be called a road, had been so little used that it was difficult to say when it had last had a vehicle over it; one could just make out some wheel-tracks, but they could well have been several years old, because in some places sea-campion and alpine sandwort had had peace to grow on the road, and even madder. It was onto this dubious side road that the woman now steered her big car in the fog, at a time when every bird in the land was silenced.
Where are we going?
The woman smiled at me and answered gently: Where do you think, my love, except to the end of the world?
And we continued to drive along the sandy gravel and tried to make out the track, but the fog reduced the horizon to three or four metres in front of the car.
After a while the landscape changed and this so-called road began to cross meadowlands pink with withered grass. Worst of all, the ground now became extremely soggy and this big car, nearly three tons in weight, and low-slung, began to have difficulty in making headway.
The woman’s companion did not feel he had the right to make suggestions in such an unrecognisable place; at the very worst the car would get stuck. And so it did. In the middle of my determination not to think nor draw conclusions in this matter, we landed in a morass and the engine cut out. When we tried to start off again, the wheels raced; the back wheels dug themselves still deeper down. The car rested on its axle. The visibility had gone so completely that the mascot on the radiator could no longer be seen. As a result, our morass had lost its boundaries. The woman laughed until she started crying and laid my head under her cheek. We’ll wade home through the marsh, said the woman.
She was wearing expensive waterproof boots up to the calves, ideal for strolling in the sunshine of Nice and San Remo. Yet she was much better shod for difficult journeys than the undersigned in his shiny black chrome-tanned leather shoes with narrow toes. When we had succeeded in pushing open the front door on one side and making a little opening, the mud from the morass poured into the car. As soon as I stepped outside I sank in up to the ankles.
The woman said we should leave our things behind, except that she was bringing with her this soft red case: There is some ham in it, and tea. Your things can wait until morning!
Embi: I have nothing but a duffel bag. But I don’t dare to leave it in a morass at night. The car might sink. In the duffel bag are my shorthand notes and notebooks, my tape recorder, and all the tapes with the recordings. These are nominally speaking official documents, and if they sink or fall into the hands of dishonest people then I have broken confidence and lost my honour.
The outcome was that we fetched out my duffel bag and the woman’s case, and then she locked the trunk. We set off, each carrying our own luggage. She said she could find where she lived by the smell—from here one went by the stink of decaying seaweed, which smelled like train oil.
Now we waded back and forth across this rotting swamp, I don’t know for how much of the night, because the sense of time is said to be the first of the senses that goes when one is lost. Even at the height of spring a foggy night like this is dark. My shoes filled up and I took them off lest they got left behind in the mud. I never became quite clear whether this horrible swamp covered a huge expanse of land or whether we kept on going round in circles in the morass. One thing was certain: we never got back to the Imperial again. Perhaps it had sunk. And then we suddenly stumbled across unmistakeable wheel-tracks that led out of this broad morass at one spot but seemed to have no connection with other roads.
Woman: This is the bog-dwellers’ road to my home.
We now followed this path, endless at one end, in the direction that led away from the morass, and gradually reached drier going than there had been for a while, the ground between marshland and moor. Then sandy dunes with tangle and algae. Now it felt underfoot as if there were a slope a short distance ahead. I had my shoes under my arm and wiped the mud off them on the grass. I hadn’t a dry stitch left.
All of sudden there was the turf of a homefield underfoot, and meadow-flowers growing in old farm-lanes. On a low grassy bank a farmhouse loomed through the fog.
We stood opposite the ribbed front of a little house with a turf roof. Sheep bleated at us from the roof. The living room window had six panes, but the window upstairs under the gable-head had four. The walls of the house were of turves that were long since overgrown. Once upon a time the gable had probably been red, then tarred, then limed; now much worn by wind and weather. In front of the window hung a faded piece of cotton that had received the sunshine of many a feeble summer.
This is my home, said the woman. I’m just going to pop in and wake mother and father and ask whether I can have a young man to stay the night with me. I’ll make up a bed and tidy up the living room. I’m going to light a fire. Then I shall bake you some bread. Do please have a seat on the wall of the vegetable garden while you wait, my dear.
The house was unlocked and she opened the door and went straight in with her case and closed the door behind her.
The vegetable garden had not been dug yet and the dog had probably been hanged, because alien sheep were besieging the house. Under the farmhouse wall there stood a thicket of willow, birch, and angelica all intertwined, growing above the high withered grass; the old people had not had the energy to restore the fence, so the sheep cropped the leaves as soon as they sprouted. A ewe looked at me severely from under the thicket and bleated accusingly.
When I had hung about for a while out in the night rain I started wondering what the woman had meant when she whispered that we were going to the end of the world. Was it this place?
My fingers were so stiff I could hardly get my shoes on. What had become of the woman? Was she having so much difficulty in waking the old couple? Or was it so hard to get their consent for a young man to stay the night with her? There was no smoke coming from the chimney, either. Warm bread still seemed a long way off. Soon I had started shivering. Was I to perish of cold here, or what was I to do? Perhaps the best solution to the problem would have been to open the door, walk in, and go straight into the bed of the warm woman. Unfortunately no brilliant ideas occurred to me. I could not keep quiet and shouted in the direction of the house:
Where are you?
No reply.
I shivered and shook for a little while longer until I sighed hopelessly into the fog: Where am I?
But no reply. No sign of life at the house. At last my patience failed and I shouted out with all my strength of body and soul this one word, so that the alien sheep that surrounded the house shied away in terror:
Úa!
The reply to this extraordinary shout was a chil
ly cry from out of the fog like that of a great black-backed gull, and yet not that. When I listened more closely it sounded like laughter, and I recognised it: it was the woman in the other house. She laughed and laughed. The house laughed.
Your emissary crept away with his duffel bag in the middle of the laughter, but too stiff in the fingers to fasten his shoes. I was a little frightened. When I was out of sight of the house I took to my heels with my laces flapping about my ankles, and I ran as hard as I could back the way I had come. I was hoping that I would find the main road again.
1 A literal translation of the original Icelandic title is Christianity at Glacier.
2 The woman, named Þórgunna in the thirteenth-century Eyrbyggja Saga, caused great trouble when her dead body was being transported from Snæfellsnes to the bishopric at Skálholt.
A VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2005
Copyright © 1968 by Halldór Laxness
Translation copyright © 1972 by Magnus Magnusson.
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Susan Sontag
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage
Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published
in Iceland as Kristnihald Undir Jökli by Helgafell, Reykjavík, in 1968.
Copyright © 1968 by Halldór Laxness. First published in English in
slightly different form as Christianity at Glacier by Helgafell, Reykjavík,
in 1972, and as Under the Glacier by Helgafell, Reykjavík, in 1999. Published
here by agreement with Licht & Burr Literary Agency, Denmark, on behalf
of Vaka-Helgafell, Iceland.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Halldór Laxness, 1902–1998
[Kristnihald undir jökli. English]
Under the glacier / Halldór Laxness ; translated from the Icelandic by
Magnus Magnusson; introduction by Susan Sontag.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-0-307-42988-9
I. Magnusson, Magnus. II. Title.
PT7511.L3K713 2004
839’.6935—dc22 2004043086
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
v1.0
Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION - Outlandish
1 - The Bishop Wants an Emissary
2 - Emissary of the Bishop: EmBi for Short
3 - Journey from the Capital to Glacier
4 - Evening at Glacier
5 - The Story of Hnallþóra and the Fairy Ram
6 - Morning at Glacier
7 - Two Buildings
8 - Interrogation of the Parish Clerk
9 - Women Bring Soap
10 - Doughty Women at Glacier
11 - The Story of Úrsalei
12 - Farriers
13 - A Highly Responsible Office
14 - Inventory of the Parish Church at Glacier
15 - Le Cimetière Délirant, i.e., the Best Churchyard in the Land
16 - Marital Status of Pastor J. Prímus
17 - Philosophy at Glacier
18 - About the Creation of the World, God’s Name among the Teutons, etc., at Glacier (Summary)
19 - Twelve Tons
20 - Provisional Summary
21 - De Pisteria
22 - Strange Moment of Time
23 - Winter-Pasture Shepherds
24 - The Red One Found, the Grey One Bolted Again
25 - Banquet of Dried Halibut
26 - Intergalactic Communication
27 - Dandelion and Honeybee
28 - The Glacier
29 - Miracle Postponed
30 - Four Widows or a Fourfold Madam
31 - Your New Instructions, and a Work-Report
32 - Night Vigil
33 - The Mourners and Their Solace
34 - Extra Day at Glacier
35 - Yet Another Disputation about the Same Thing
36 - A Geophysical Drop, and So On
37 - The Veranda, Continued: Night
38 - The Woman Guðrún Sæmundsdóttir from Neðratraðkot
39 - An Account of G. Sýngmannsdóttir
40 - Reality as the Head-Bone of a Fish
41 - Repairing the Quick-Freezing Plants
42 - The Poetry of Saint John of the Cross and So On
43 - Uncertain Balance, Etc.
44 - Away
45 - Home
About the Author
Also by HALLDÓR LAXNESS
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION - Outlandish
1 - The Bishop Wants an Emissary
2 - Emissary of the Bishop: EmBi for Short
3 - Journey from the Capital to Glacier
4 - Evening at Glacier
5 - The Story of Hnallþóra and the Fairy Ram
6 - Morning at Glacier
7 - Two Buildings
8 - Interrogation of the Parish Clerk
9 - Women Bring Soap
10 - Doughty Women at Glacier
11 - The Story of Úrsalei
12 - Farriers
13 - A Highly Responsible Office
14 - Inventory of the Parish Church at Glacier
15 - Le Cimetière Délirant, i.e., the Best Churchyard in the Land
16 - Marital Status of Pastor J. Prímus
17 - Philosophy at Glacier
18 - About the Creation of the World, God’s Name among the Teutons, etc., at Glacier (Summary)
19 - Twelve Tons
20 - Provisional Summary
21 - De Pisteria
22 - Strange Moment of Time
23 - Winter-Pasture Shepherds
24 - The Red One Found, the Grey One Bolted Again
25 - Banquet of Dried Halibut
26 - Intergalactic Communication
27 - Dandelion and Honeybee
28 - The Glacier
29 - Miracle Postponed
30 - Four Widows or a Fourfold Madam
31 - Your New Instructions, and a Work-Report
32 - Night Vigil
33 - The Mourners and Their Solace
34 - Extra Day at Glacier
35 - Yet Another Disputation about the Same Thing
36 - A Geophysical Drop, and So On
37 - The Veranda, Continued: Night
38 - The Woman Guðrún Sæmundsdóttir from Neðratraðkot
39 - An Account of G. Sýngmannsdóttir
40 - Reality as the Head-Bone of a Fish
41 - Repairing the Quick-Freezing Plants
42 - The Poetry of Saint John of the Cross and So On
43 - Uncertain Balance, Etc.
44 - Away
45 - Home
About the Author
Also by HALLDÓR LAXNESS
Copyright Page
Under the Glacier Page 20
