Free Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness Page A

swilling down this sugary-sweet kettle-coffee and biting into these thick slices with their mountains of butter the like of which one has to go to Denmark to see. Perhaps it was margarine, by the way. Or what? I don’t care; it was a marvellous feast whatever anyone says, and I couldn’t help exclaiming: What matchless bread!
    Pastor Jón Prímus: Old women all over the place keep me in pot-bread. It varies a bit actually, but it’s never downright bad; at least I never suffer any ill-effects. And this is rather a good woman we’ve got today, perhaps we’ll have her tomorrow as well. (Pointing to my shoes): What a beautiful pair of shoes you have, by the way. How much do shoes like these cost in the south nowadays?
    I guessed at the price, and he thought it high.
    Pastor Jón: But it’s a pleasure to own beautiful shoes. Once I had a beautiful pair of shoes and a girl.
    Embi: And now?
    Pastor Jón: I have the glacier, and of course the lilies of the field: they are with me, I am with them; but above all, the glacier. No wonder it infects these excellent girls around here! In the old days when I got tired I used to look forward to falling asleep with the glacier in the evenings. I also looked forward to waking up to it in the mornings. (Here the pastor smiles lyrically and looks at me.) Now I am beginning to look forward to dying from this highly responsible office and entering the glacier.

14
     
    Inventory of the Parish Church at Glacier
     
    Vegetation. All around the church and right up to it the grass is tall, and all still withered. The lych-gate consists of weathered, rotting pieces of wood just visible above the old brittle grass. What the Edda says about the paths to houses that no one visits applies also to the path to the church. The derelict external condition of the church was described earlier; no need to elaborate further.
    Entrance. First, the threshold. This threshold as measured by the undersigned was forty-eight centimetres above ground. Cannot see how members of the congregation can gain entry into God’s House if one excepts gymnasts in the prime of life. For the reason stated, it seems that people who are lame or rheumaticky, elderly women and greybeards, would not be happy to come here. Pastor Jón says in reply that a set of steps with a few rungs must have been removed for other purposes. No one had complained about this arrangement. The steps were not missed.
    Over the church door there is a kind of gable-head or rafter made of two deal boards, for ornament and protection. This gable has been in some sort of architectural relationship with the entrance door and both were once brown, but gradually they have become colourless through decay and weathering. Door-latch out of order. The lock gone. Hinges awry, mountings rusted through. Three boards form a bar across the church door, and their ends have in fact been securely nailed to the doorposts, the idea doubtless being to prevent this double door blowing open in a storm.
    The pastor explains that the bishop himself had looked at these church doors some years ago and thought them good, at least not raised any objections, but not gone inside. Whereupon in the name of the Lord and the Forty Holy Knights, let’s try to get this church open, says pastor Jón Prímus.
    The pastor now gets busy with the claw hammer. As soon as each board is prised loose he pulls out the rusty nails and puts them in his pocket. He manages to ease the door from the doorposts even though the hinges are in poor condition. Everything creaks and groans. The inner door was painted a light colour with oak patterns, and it screeched evilly when it was opened. Dark in the church; a smell of rot and decay gushed out to meet us. The undersigned requests that the wooden shutters be torn from one or two windows, and the pastor obliges and a glimmer of daylight enters. A gust of air swept through the decaying building. The floor heaved, like a quagmire. Water has obviously got into