Under the Glacier Read Online Free PDF Page A

mountains. Apart from the shed, the only other sign of human habitation is a decaying wooden bench of three planks, fastened to the ground beside the door. The undersigned sits down on the bench with his duffel bag beside him and brings out a map. The fog has sliced the tops off the mountains, and is thickest where the glacier should be, according to the map. There is a fine drizzle. The hillock glows green in the twilight, and lava-knuckles protrude from it here and there. When I tried the locked door again I noticed there was a board above it; some letters had been painted on it with lamp-black or tar a long time ago, and even though the lettering was blurred and grimy and the board decaying, one could still make out the words: PRIMUSES REPAIRED HERE.
    The bridle path to the parsonage lay in a semicircle past the hillock. Beside the path stood a tethered calf, very wretched-looking, swollen-bellied, suffering from the scour, wry-faced, his forehead matted, hanging his head, not lowing. The visitor stops on the paving at the door. The long side of the house faced the sea, and the homefield reached to the edge of a sea-cliff where white birds sailed overhead.
    Is it the bishop? a woman asks, coming to the door.
    Embi: No, I’m afraid not. But I have a letter from the south.
    Woman: You’re the same as a bishop, and there was a telegram saying you were on the way. Do come in. But the pastor isn’t at home.
    It’s a labyrinth of a house, put together from many elements; a long front building lying east to west, made of timber clad with corrugated iron; windows and door on the side facing the sea. Thereafter came a row of misshapen wooden hovels that merged into an infinity of turf huts, tumbledown or ruined; those farthest away had become one with the green hillocks in the homefield; this kind of architecture, one shed after the other, is a little like the propagation of coral, or cactuses. The woman invited me into the living room. Then she disappeared.
    I settled down to wait. All the doors were wide open, letting in a dank draught, and the chilly bleating of the seabirds on the cliffs filled the open house in the twilight. The front door was off its hinges; the living room door opened onto the passage and creaked piercingly if one tried to move it. The room had once upon a time been painted light blue, but the paint had peeled off, leaving patches that were dark red from some even earlier coat of paint, and there were now patches on the patches; these inner patches were poison green. In the living room there was an enormously long table with wooden benches along both sides; everything was made of undressed deal planks hammered together with four-inch nails. The furniture consisted of a chest of drawers, a writing desk, and a bureau, all much the worse for wear; nor was it easy to imagine what had happened to the drawers, as they had all disappeared.
    When the bishop’s emissary had been sitting for an hour, he began to feel the effect of the raw cold. What was your emissary to do with himself? Should he perhaps go and look for the woman and tell her he was cold? Had he then come to a stranger’s house just to complain about his own lot? He came to the conclusion that he had no right to complain. He had been sent here only to look for facts. If he had to sit here without food all night, that was as good a fact for his report as any other. It’s about as unscientific as it would be dishonest to stop a scientific process in midstream on moral grounds—for instance, because one’s feet are frozen.
    Your emissary had occupied himself for the first hour by jotting down in shorthand an account of the day’s journey, but he stopped because of the cold, besides which it was scarcely light enough to write, and that’s why the journey peters out with the arctic skuas in Kolbeinsstaðir District. He gets up, stretches, wrestles with the creaking door for a bit, then goes outside and heads for the sea. He stands on the edge of