Read From the Mouth of the Whale for Free Online Page B

education of the flock in that parish, Reverend Sigurdur Pétursson, a young man who had recently taken up the living there … A sunny countenance, spare of flesh, nimble in his movements and loving to his wife and the child she bore under her belt … They had occupied the living for only four months when he lost his mind … which was seventeen days before he ordered the burning … That day Reverend Sigurdur awoke before anyone else, already raving … He ran in his nightshirt to the library, locked himself in and began hurling the books higgledy-piggledy on the floor … The servants watched aghast through the windows as he tore off his shift, flung himself on his back and rolled around on the books like a flea-bitten stray in the farmyard … Howling, he seized the writings at random, laid them on his naked flesh and rubbed them against himself, up and down, up and down, in a sinful fashion … But when he started ripping pages from the books and shoving them into his bodily orifices, the servants, afraid that he would choke himself, broke down the door … They overpowered the minister and tied him to his bed … The source of his madness was traced to a thumb-sized statue carved of whale ivory, supposedly representing Saint Barbara with her tower, which the minister’s young wife had found among the old clutter belonging to the monks and intended to use as a bogeyman for the unborn child … She had been toying with this object, which had probably been carved by some newly baptised Greenlander, while sitting on the bed in the couple’s room and had inadvertently pushed it under her husband’s pillow … So Reverend Sigurdur had been sleeping on it the night he went mad … When he was released from his bed-prison seventeen days later, however, the parson’s mind was sharper and more lucid than ever before … He ordered his sexton to clear out the library, pile the heretical collection in a heap in the field and build three bonfires with the books, which he then set alight himself … Providence guided me to Helgafell that day … I was meant to witness the tragedy … I was on my way to Stadarstadur to paint an altarpiece that I had carved earlier that winter … Seeing a pall of smoke over Helgafell as if the very hill were on fire, I gave in to curiosity and headed for the parsonage … Had I been able to fly like a bird, I might have made do with lifting myself over the hill to see what was causing the smoke … But no, I covered the whole distance on foot, arriving to find the fire at its height and, falling on my knees before it, I wept … That day Jónas ‘the Learned’ sank to new depths of ignominy in the eyes of his fellow men … But they did not see what I saw … Or if they did see, they did not understand what was happening before their eyes … When the bonfire in the middle, the largest, breathed its last, admitting a rush of air to the embers like a thousand devils all racing in single file down the same pipe, there was a great crack of thunder from the pyre … Everyone jumped – there was not supposed to be any gunpowder in the fire … While they were exchanging astonished glances, I kept my gaze fixed on the flames … I saw an open book rise from the pyre and float over the blazing pile … It appeared to be quite intact, the spine facing down, the pages spreading like wings … In an instant it glowed a dazzling white … And the parson’s youngest daughter cried out in a high voice:
    ‘Baba, see de birdy!’
    Next moment the book exploded in a shower of sparks … And the heat blew them to heaven … A year later Reverend Sigurdur rowed out in a boat to collect down and eggs from a small island in Lake Helgafell with two of his siblings to help … By then he had become so arrogant in spiritual matters that he did not give a fig for the enchantment under which the island was said to lie … But on that trip his boat was holed in the middle and all three of them drowned … O little