The Hills Reply

by Tarjei Vesaas

  There can be nothing more.

  Something must be done. Done. Halted by the water, and the pull from deep down, that’s what he thinks – because he has the inverted mirrors facing him.

  Slipping a little more.

  * * *

  —

  THE MIRRORS in the bewildered eyes down below have come alive and work on him with all their might. They suck him to them. He understands better and better that this is where he is to go. Now. The picture dissolves, then rearranges itself. There is no way past the water-mirrors. They increase in strength and fascination as they throw inverted images up from the depths. He is ensnared by them, and believes blindly in what they tell him.

  Leaning over more. Still he does not slide down. Staring at the picture which is supposed to be himself. Soon he has forgotten that he is looking at his own reflection. Nor could he have recognized any part of it. The eye is no longer a human eye. It is transformed; it calls and says come, and the mirrors charm capriciously between. They have such drawing power because this is happening on the outermost edge of the abyss.

  Tossing forwards and backwards the whole time. The brief time; this will not last long.

  Yet – the flashing of the mirrors that do not exist, with colours in polished mirror edges that promise better things. The exhausted man on the rock has no real resistance to offer. The outcome must be decided already.

  They lure him on. Come.

  Not quite ready. His feet still seem to be caught in what he has trampled on.

  Come now.

  He cannot distinguish one thing from another, what is down or what is up. The mirrors have done this to him. But he does not let himself slide yet. Come down, he hears, kindly and insistently. He leans over lower and farther.

  Come, he hears, and he could not possibly hear anything more beautiful.

  The features down below are about to lose their normal shape, worn away by the hard struggle. Only the eyes and what is saying Come. In all the confusion something is repeating, as evenly as a clock: Come. There is a tempo in it that is a part of the attack on him.

  He does not know that it is his own power of allurement and seduction that is facing him from the head in the water. He watches it like a stranger, or a distant, kind friend.

  The most beautiful word in existence approaches him from two directions. It is double, and the distance between up and down is continually shortening. In reality the gap gets deeper, in reality it is sinking a little all the time; something important is being snuffed out.

  But what is important and not important when one’s own features have disintegrated? The tired man on the brink of the river can find no reasonable explanation for this.

  The most beautiful word in existence joins itself from above and below, and then everything is ready for action. He does not see the sharp boundary he is crossing. His feet begin to slide out of their foothold without a signal from any central place.

  He is not even aware that it is he who is falling at this moment. Because it feels just as much up as down.

  But he is setting out on his journey down. Hold after hold up here must release him. He slides down as quietly as a shadow can glide into deep water. There was no height; he was just above the surface. No ripples result. A little agitation in the mirror, that is all. It happens gently, and at first up and down do not change places.

  He has let go of the last hold.

  His thoughts are twisted into a hopeless tangle. He lets himself slide down in shock because his face broke up as he was watching. It had become natural to slide into it. He had already become the other, the one who was calling.

  He scarcely notices the transition. A little jerk of cold from somewhere. The eye that compelled this journey is not with him, nor the thoughts about what led him here. Now explosions of newness are crashing over him.

  * * *

  —

  HIS MIRROR WAS SMASHED and vanished, but only in the instant when the eye struck against its own averted surface. As he sinks he manages to open his eyes again, confused beneath the surface of the water, and sees mirrors or mirror images in improbable patterns. They reflect and flash with improbable objects, while he moves downwards and the shortage of air begins to throttle him. Very soon this becomes urgently painful. He starts to flail his arms and struggle wildly for air, without thinking or remembering where the air is, frightened and flailing his arms more and more.

  Everything at once. Things happen that make no impression on him. They stream through him in an instant. He manages to grasp a little of it.

  It grows light around him. He has brought some shining pearls with him into the deep water. Nothing strange in that: the mirrors are standing up there at all angles. The pearls shine about his head and shoot small dots of light down through his path. He strikes them with his flailing arms and there are many more.

  Suddenly they are no longer with him. It grows darker, but not completely dark.

  Everything at once. Threads that go out from him and into the denser darkness a short distance away. Curious glimpses from the mirrors’ edges and from his own eye-miracle and the pearls that he still thinks he is flailing. Objects do not stay still, they are carried away; everything is carried away down here by a current, slowly, with a gentle consideration that dwells in its enormous strength. The man also is seized by it and is carried gently and surely away. Away and at the same time upwards through the layers of water, towards the surface.

  He has no thoughts about it.

  For him everything is happening at once. He is straining for air. Thunder is surrounding in his ears. His clothes hang heavily on him, yet he is rising.

  Meanwhile he becomes numb and semi-conscious. Pearls and glimpses of mirrors and everything shining around him are snuffed out. And nothing is calling. Gradually relaxing he is carried at an angle up and up – because of his lighter weight and the laws controlling the currents in the deep water.

  Nor does he miss in his semi-conscious state the dance of the mirrors that happened so suddenly. It has been left behind somewhere, he has forgotten about it. And no one is calling.

  No, no one is calling down here. It was imagination, and far distant from the darker matters that are forcing themselves in on him now: whether he is to be snuffed out too. It has almost reached that point, but he is still moving at an angle up to where the air is. He does not know it; he knows nothing now. He dimly perceives a shadow passing by, with a burning spot in it. It seems larger than it ought to be, because it came from somewhere in the middle of a streak of flame. From the surface he knows nothing about. Then there is nothing. But the surface is not far away now. The breaking point comes nearer all the time. Increasingly heavy, choking, he knows no more about that than about the rest.

  Knows little now.

  Darker below.

  Is there something?

  What is something?

  Nobody here.

  Twilight below. More and more twilight.

  Thunder in my ears.

  He has no notion of the current down here. The current has abruptly changed direction: something turns him, and all of a sudden he sinks straight down.

  It doesn’t matter; he notices nothing.

  Then the man is standing in the slime once more. It is not quite dark; the water is shallower, so that a little daylight penetrates down to the muddy river bed. There is a shimmer here, but the half-snuffed out man does not know about it.

  His feet are planted in the slime, weighted by all the earthly loads he has dressed himself in. Thunder is echoing in his ears. The iron grip on his throat and chest is loosening. If he sees anything, it is his own fantasy. It all happens so fast.

  But life is obstinate; it will not allow this to happen.

  * * *

  —

  HE SENSES THAT OBJECTS are passing him. It is all fantasy. Strange shadows go past. Forests
go past. Oceans of people go past. Then an unexpected streak of light moves from another direction and clarifies matters a little: he feels that he is standing on something. He jerks into consciousness from his half-bursting condition. His heavy boots are standing on earth. His brain clears, he kicks wildly in order to get rid of the boots, to get lighter. He has an inkling about making himself lighter and floating upwards. Here is a chance to go upwards. He is desperate for air but bends down and manages to get off the boots. He flails his arms and gets his jacket off too. He is half dead, but savage. And now he is lighter, now he is in the current once more.

  He thinks he is shouting at the top of his voice while doing this. He thinks he is struggling with monstrous beasts. Kicked up slime whirls round him and is drawn away; he is lighter and rises upwards into yet another kind of current. He does not feel this; everything is again at a distance. But it has all happened with incredible speed since he let himself slide down. He is still alive.

  He is greeted by a glimmer that keeps a hold on his life during the final turns of the reel, as a few wild pictures unfold. He does not see it visually, only feeling it as a nudge.

  He will soon be up.

  Then it becomes huge and different. He gets part of his face up to the surface – and now air and water seem to leap in fragments. He does not know what it is, but something from inside himself leaps into the air. Great mountains fall away from him, he shoots up to the sky. He inhales all the air in the world. He knows no more than that.

  He is not aware that he is floating on the surface now. His face guides itself so that it can get at the air. The water laps over it now and then, but he is able to lift himself up slightly and draw in air as if with his last few breaths.

  The gentle, superior force of the river seizes him at once and carries him slowly along. As yet he is scarcely aware of it.

  * * *

  —

  ONCE AGAIN THE MIRRORS are playing with him. They are active in the sunshine. For there is sunshine and daylight up here. He has been in an artificial night. Sometimes he bobs beneath the surface, but comes up again each time and manages to breathe as much as is necessary. He is exposed to all the rays he can scarcely bear, all kinds of shadows, all kinds of half-sleeping fantasies.

  He has come to a part of the river where occasional logs of timber are floating downstream. No lumberjacks are in sight. A log bumps into his side and, without knowing what he is doing, he throws his arms round it in a convulsive grip that he never loosens. It holds him up and keeps his face above water. Together they float downstream. He does not think about it. He is scarcely aware of it.

  No people and no buildings on the banks of the river. When he left in his despair he had walked far into the woods, where the broad waterway flows alone, and only then did he approach the water.

  There are woods here; otherwise it is quite deserted. There is nobody on the shore to see that something unusual is floating out there.

  That’s not quite correct. Something sees it. Birds in the air see it, have already seen it. They behave in several ways. Some keep silent, others set up a cry in whatever way they can. A couple of crows are accompanying him from tree to tree, keeping silent, following, biding their time.

  The drifter himself on the water, can he hear anything? Can he see? He does not yet understand what there is to see and hear. Nothing is clear to him. Bird calls and gleams of sunshine alternate with ploughing under water – and thus it continues. He is blind to the succession of pictures. He half sleeps his way forward, drawing in fresh, life-giving air and coughing out water. He drifts imperceptibly and continually southward, past deserted banks, clinging to the log. The water-mirrors throb with distorted sunshine and all that is dangerously and confusing to someone like him.

  Suddenly he shrieks. Something has snapped at his foot down there. It released him at once, but the resulting smart that he imagines streams through his body as the water is streaming outside it. It wakes him up.

  He kicks out blindly. After this struggle panic mounts up easily in the chaotic and depleted space inside him. Then he feels a fresh bite or sting. Down in the depths.

  He is going to be devoured by something, he believes in his delirium. A lightning flash from a mirror told him of it. Perhaps he is half devoured already? What can he know about it? The mirrors, and his own position close to death, can tell him what no other can.

  He starts to say something that was meant to be, “No, no!”

  A bellowing.

  The call was loud. It rolls to the shore. The two crows who are following and waiting flutter out from the nearest tree and take a long sweep before returning to hide in another tree close by.

  The call comes back as an echo, and spreads in the vast silence. It tears a veil in front of him – and the mirrors strike with all the incitement at their command. In cracks and openings, which the harsh treatment has opened and closed again, there they attack.

  Come, they say. Just like the last time, on land.

  He does not understand it.

  Come? What does that mean?

  No, something in him answers, purely by accident.

  He is indifferent really.

  All the same it is a moment of awakening. He is close beside rustling shores. The quiet is rustling in the treetops. The briefest of awakenings. He is still holding on to a log.

  The quiet also brings scents with it from land to the half dead man who is floating past like any piece of driftwood. The strange smell that has accompanied him from the slime mingles with them. Birds are flying above him, following the same course as himself, and the water, and the mirrors. In a flash it appears to him as a great, rustling journey.

  It does not occur to him that these are birds of prey following him; he likes them. Everything is out on a journey. And now he can take a nap and rest for a while, he thinks vaguely, and is on the point of plunging down into desperation again.

  He is hindered by a small promontory jutting out fairly close to him. It suggests the idea of making a crawling motion with his arms in order to try to swim ashore. Nothing comes of it; he has no extra strength at all. Presumably he will have to be satisfied with floating passively on a river.

  But it looks as if he will not get any sleep. At that instant he knocks his skull on something with a thud that is repeated many times. It is a sinking log with only the root sticking up above water. The man has his own log to cling to, but opens his eyes wider all the same, sensing that he has a means of saving himself for the time being.

  They float past the sinking log, which resembles a dark, empty face sticking up.

  It is a blessed relief to come to full knowledge of the log, to hold on to something that does not go under at once. But something is fluttering close above him. The bird and death. The bird alights on the log and inspects it closely, but flies up again. No death yet, apparently. The grey-black bird flaps its wings heavily and in annoyance as it flies out of sight in order to wait a little longer.

  It looks as if he will be in the company of the bird at the last. No savage death after all: a supine, quiet death, the kind that dwells in the hollows in the woods and which the crows never miss. The man understands something, and is about to lose his hold on the log, but quickly seizes it again when the bird rises. Wood is a capital material to hold on to in deep water. Not down there, he thinks.

  * * *

  —

  THE ANNOYING, MEDDLESOME mirrors are stubbornly trained on the drifter. There they are, wherever he turns his exhausted head, adding still more confusion to all that he wants to think about. Can all this really be true?

  It is not true, he tries to say as soon as it clears for a moment. I don’t see them. Nothing has been true today, he thinks.

  Up and down. In a little while he is not up to holding on to the log any more; he lets go. At once he bobs under, long enough to notice how various creatures down there shoot
away from him sideways, creatures that have collected and followed him on his journey. He catches small side glances from them and gathers that they are not friendly. But they are too small to swallow him whole.

  He is below for only an instant, then grasps the log above him and floats up again. He has no energy, except the small amount needed to cling to the saving yellow timber. He is not thinking deeply about weight and sinking, but he senses that he is lighter.

  Very well, rise up to the open surface again. A thought forms through all obstacles, the thought that this is extraordinary. Something more too, but he stops and comes no further.

  The beginning of something: that this is extraordinary.

  A short while after: How much is needed?

  He comes no further.

  This was thought in the fresh air, for his head is on the surface again. Up on the shining expanse, in the gentle pull of the waterway.

  He still does nothing himself, merely holds on, as still as a mouse, floating along and thinking the thought that it is extraordinary. It has stayed with him like a solace together with the log he lost and found again.

  The current has hold of him, and the current seems kindly disposed and will perhaps set him carefully on land sooner or later like any other piece of driftwood. Like any other reject. They usually end up on land.

  Don’t come here! he thinks all of a sudden. A new shudder of thought had opened.

  I’m thinking about the bird, he thinks.

  Don’t come.

  Come, say the water-mirrors in their own way, from their own point of view.

  He drifts with the current towards all that must be ahead, without bothering about it in the slightest. With him he has his retinue of birds and death and the water that he will never be rid of, and the fantasy mirrors.

  Come! insist all the others. He will not.