Under the Glacier (26 page)

Authors: Halldór Laxness

BOOK: Under the Glacier

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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 chilly 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

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

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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