From the Mouth of the Whale Read Online Free PDF

I used to shudder when they mimicked the sound of these half-men … Now I leant backwards as I walked and dug in my heels, for from what I could tell the procession was headed to that very spot, the dreaded Mary Mound, where men went mad and were turned into beasts … How come they kept the Peter Lamb there of all places? Why on earth would they put the blessed little beast in such peril? And what might the lamb not turn into if it happened to graze on the mound and fall foul of the spells of the malevolent unseen power? My imagination gave birth to a monster as huge as the dreadful mound itself … A hairy sack that rolled inexorably along, dragging with it everything in its path … Man and beast alike were ensnared in the wet tangles of its wool and pulled inwards to the corpse-pale flesh which was covered all over with yellow sheep’s eyes, a coffin worm writhing in every one … That would be the last thing I saw before the monster rolled another ring around itself and crushed me on a rock … The material for this nightmarish vision was derived from the bloated carcass of a drowned ram that the older children had shown me at Hraunlón earlier that summer … I cried out:
    ‘I don’t want to see the lamb!’
    And dropped into the grass … My grandmother jerked me briskly to my feet and pressed me close to her side without once breaking the rhythm of her stride or song … There was no escaping … For the remainder of the march I kept silent while the monster writhed and rolled and tumbled in my imagination … When the procession reached the Mary Mound, the crowd gathered in its lee so as not to be seen from the other farms … I had expected the Peter Lamb to greet us, bleating hungrily as is the custom of hand-reared lambs, but there was nothing here apart from the mound … The crowd fell to their knees and clasped their hands, all except Grandfather Hákon, the old man in the hooded cloak and two farm workers; I myself naturally copied my grandmother’s every move … Peeping over my clasped fingers, I cast around for the lamb … Instead I saw the farmhands remove spades from under their coats and, on my grandfather’s orders, start to break soil on the mound … They inserted the spades into gaps between the tussocks and sliced the turf crosswise, top and bottom, then down the slope from the middle of the upper cut to the middle of the lower one, until it resembled nothing so much as a pair of church doors as tall as a man … Now each of the farmhands stuck his spade deep under a door, thereby loosening the turf from the soil … After this, they peeled aside the doors, laying them back on the slope on either side like the panels of an altarpiece, revealing a rectangle filled with black earth … I was deeply unimpressed by my grandfather’s foolhardiness and could not understand why the good man should amuse himself by disturbing the peace of the cruel forces that dwelt in the Mary Mound, but then things took a turn for the worse … Grandfather fetched from his pouch a thick hog-bristle brush and began to sweep it along the soil at head height … I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my forehead against my clasped hands: the spirits would not like this … At that moment I heard a new sound: the gentle clacking of wooden beads … Rosaries dropped from the sleeves of the people in the crowd and they began to tell them with sighs and moans, calling forth in my breast a mixture of laughter and anguish which I had never before realised could exist in the same place … The brush whisked in my grandfather Hákon’s hand … The man in the cloak drew back his hood and at last I could glimpse something of his face: nose and eyes … a tuft of hair on the nose, the blue eyes vacant … Thrusting his staff into the spongy ground, he leant on it with his left hand while producing a small book from his scrip with his right … The brush sent the last crumbs of the thin layer of earth whirling away to reveal