Read Online Iceland's Bell by Halldór Laxness - Free Book Online Page A

poor wretch to float along with you and to put her ashore somewhere at the tip of the cape.”
    “There’s enough of a crowd of beggars at Suðurnes,” they say.
    Time passes, and the moving days have ended.* Yet still the woman totters down to the beach every morning, wanting to make a journey. Finally some steersman gives up and takes her on board with a curse, puts her ashore by Grótta,* and rows away. She creeps over kelp-grown rocks and sea-beaten stones until she reaches a grassy bank. Well then, she’d crossed over the sea. The mountains of her home, Akrafjall and Skarðsheiði, appeared hazy blue in the distance.
    She set out, following the promontory toward the mainland. The spring day was bright and calm, and she walked up the slope at the center of the cape to have a look about. Cottages cowered amidst the tangle down below the flood-line. On the far side of the fjord south of the cape the sun gleamed off the residence at Bessastaðir, where the king’s men held sway; on the cape’s northern side were oblong buildings on low, flat skerries out in the sea and a merchantman at anchor: the trading station of Hólmur.* Distant blue peaks on the mainland flanked smaller mountains whose darkish slopes were patched with strips of green. She walked along the coastline for most of the day, crossing over stony hills and soggy marshland until she came to a river that fell in two brisk branches into a bight, the stream gleaming white and blue in the sun. She knew there wasn’t much chance that she could cross over by her own strength. A foot-steady individual in the prime of his life might have taken off his socks and waded over, but she was an old woman. She decided to sit down and recite a penitential hymn composed by Reverend Halldór from Presthólar. She took a fishtail from her pouch and gnawed on it as she recited the hymn, and drank the river’s blue water from the palms of her hands as she tried to remember what verse came next, because the Lord stipulated that prayers would be granted only when they were said correctly. She took care, moreover, to recite the hymn in the right tone, drawling at every other line and easing off at the end of every verse, sadly, like a finger slipping over a sounding string.
    As she finished reciting the hymn a number of men leading a packtrain crossed over from the east, and she begged them tearfully, in Jesus’ name, to take a miserable wretch eastward over the branches, but they answered that there were already enough vagrant old women on the other side. After they were gone she stopped weeping and carried on with her penitential hymn. Then another packtrain arrived from the west, transporting stockfish. She begged them tearfully to help a poor old creature, but they were drunk from brennivín and said that they would beat her senseless with their whips if she didn’t turn around and go back to wherever it was she’d come from. Water splashed over the woman as the packtrain crossed. She stopped weeping and recited more of the hymn.
    Early in the evening a shepherd girl from one of the farms west of the river came riding out to tend her sheep on the islet between the branches. The old woman promised to ask God to bless the girl if she would help her cross over. The girl said nothing, but stopped her horse at a convenient knoll. The old woman climbed up behind the girl and they crossed over both branches, then the girl stopped the horse at another knoll and waited while the woman clambered off the horse’s back. The woman kissed the girl farewell and bade God bless her and all her offspring.
    Day had passed into night.
    On the farms to the west of the heath there were crowds of people everywhere, especially men leading packtrains to the south coast to procure stockfish; some of them had traveled long distances from the east. There were also solitary travelers, wealthy landowners who had business at Bessastaðir or with the merchants in Hólmur, and these took priority with