The Great Weaver From Kashmir

The Great Weaver From Kashmir Read Free Page A

Book: The Great Weaver From Kashmir Read Free
Author: Halldór Laxness
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with a setting and characters such as these! God bless the mountains of Iceland!
    â€œI want to go out into the world, dear Diljá, to where the world wars were fought, in countries where cathedrals were shot at just for the fun of it and widows’ hearths were leveled due to unscrupulous mistakes. You must have heard of such things. I want to see the day dawn over broken roods and carven images of Christ cut in half, over grapevines torn asunder and grapes trampled underfoot, forests uprooted; see the blessed human being who lies exhausted in the grass and either praises the Lord for the victory or curses the Devil for the defeat as he licks at his swollen wounds. I want to greet the day that dawns over the nurslings from the summer of 1914, who lost their fathers as offerings to the hands of the Kaiser, the fatherland, and the lie, freedom, slogans, and the Devil. I want to go, Diljá; Diljá, I want to see. I’m born to see; born for the wide world, the great huge world with its countless kingdoms and cities, a world full of monuments, crumbling or intact, from untold ages of culture, from ages of ascendancy and periods of decline, a world that hopes to see seven suns of new culture rise over the crumbling walls of palaces and tumbled-down towers.”
    She was silent for several moments, half-hypnotized by his passionate outburst, but when she regained her senses, she said:
    â€œI thought perhaps, Steinn, that you would have found it difficult to leave Iceland, the mountains, and your friends, but now I can hearthat you’re in seventh heaven. Don’t you know that Italy is teeming and swarming with crooks, thieves, and murderers, and that it’s totally corrupt? Folk there are like savages, and they worship idols that they call saints.”
    He walked over to the window where she was sitting and, with the intention of ridiculing her, laughed out loud.
    â€œWhere in the hell did you acquire all of this wisdom about Italy?” he asked.
    But she only looked down at her toes, avoiding his glance, and without looking up fled over to the piano once again. She recalled having read it somewhere: in her history book, or in Karl Finnbogason’s Geography. 8 But maybe she hadn’t read it anywhere; she just knew it offhand; in fact she’d never given a thought to Italy before yesterday.
    A maid knocked at the door, then stuck her head in and announced that the coffee was ready in the dining room. Neither Steinn nor Diljá moved. Steinn Elliði fiddled with his cigarette case and lit a cigarette; neither of them said anything. But the air around them quivered with future tidings, burned with secrets. The clinking of tableware was heard from within the room at the other side of the hallway, where everyone else had gone for coffee. The grandmother called out:
    â€œChildren! Come while the coffee is warm!”
    Diljá came to her senses and said:
    â€œYes, what are we doing here alone like asses?”
    He cleared his throat and replied, in an annoyed, impatient tone:
    â€œThere’s never any peace with these old grannies about! They grumble and rumble like spinning wheels, three or four at a time. Dothey think we’re all better off just because we’ve poured lukewarm coffee down our throats? Didn’t I just tell you, Diljá, that I need to discuss an important matter with you?”
    In the next instant his tone changed; he held out his hands like a rhetorician and said abstractedly:
    â€œI ought to tell you something, Diljá. I was up all night thinking about the heavenly divinity that radiates from the face of this earthly world; I was thinking of what things I should say to you before I left. What is disturbing me, Diljá, is of no small consequence. All spring long I sat by my window in the brilliant sunshine and composed a princely hymn to the sun, in between skewering fish flies with my fountain pen. No one in the world has ever conceived such

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