Read Online The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt - Free Book Online Page B

put great fear into him, that the dead man rose again after the
ganda
embraced and called him, striking him with her staff.
    â€œI T IS SAID ALSO that these travellers, who are both still as stone and
velocitates in aeribus et super terras
, can tell accuratelywhat explorers may find in undiscovered countries, such as the location of hot springs, the shape of coastlines, harbours,
et caetera
, meadows and fjords.”
    Quid dicitur? Scribo ut non?
He saw himself also, quite clearly, lying there upon a reindeer skin, a very corpse, white and cold, with staring eyes. And as he saw himself,
id quod vidit, ille qui vidit
, that which saw, he who saw, was able to leave himself there in the smoky place, and go out into the forest. There he was with others, who appeared to him, as in a dream, to be sometimes men wearing the skins of the great beasts, wolf and bear, or eagle feathers, and who sometimes had two pairs of eyes, and sometimes those two pairs melded. And these undertook a great journey, travelling over the high Torneå Fells, to Caituma, hundreds of miles. They travelled also towards Sørfold and from there—let us speak of it as in a dream, but it was no dream, a man may know if his body be dreaming or present, and to this traveller, all was present. For he saw them, in this swift
transitus, cerastium flore maximo
, and
Lycopodium echinat
which later he was to see in his more laborious journeyings.
    From there he went even to Lofoten.
    He had always greatly desired to see the renowned and terrible Maelstrøm, a wonder of the natural world. Now he found himself on the peak of the mountain, Helseggen, the Cloudy. From there he beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters were so inky a hue as to bring at once to mind the Nubian geographer’s account of the
Mare Tenebrarum
. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose gloomy character was made morestriking by the surf which reared up its white and ghastly crest …
    He saw as he watched, the character of the ocean surface change from a chopping character to a forceful current, which tamed into whirlpools, which in turn disappeared, leaving streaks of foam, which combined in a gyratory motion, taking on the motion of the subsided vortices to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly—very suddenly—this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The funnel, whose interior was a smooth, shining and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, sending to the winds an appalling voice half shriek, half roar …
    He saw himself lying on the skin as he stood in the doorway of the smoky house. He lay down on his cold body and his spirit entered his still flesh as the fingers of a hand enter a glove and spread and warm the skin. So it was, in truth.
    W HAT ARE WE MODERNS to make of this? Some researchers have suggested that his published account of his travels was to some extent mendacious. He had not, they claim, the time to have made the long journey to Kaituma—he would have had to cover 840 miles in a fortnight—and far from undertaking the dangerous sea-voyage from Sørfold to Maelstrøm, he was prevented by storms and rowed about near the beach. He was prone to exaggerate, describing the “Alps” that divide Sweden from Norway as “more than aSwedish mile high” (considerably higher than Everest). Far from journeying into
Terra Incognita
, he was only travelling where the Christian missionaries had already made trails.
    If we look at the painting he commissioned of himself in the Lapp costume he brought back from his journey, it is difficult, almost impossible, to recognise the face of the genial genius in the frizzed and curled wig who appears on