The Prophets of Eternal Fjord Read Free Page B

coach to Nykøbing in the early morning, changes to the northbound mail coach and spends the night in Vordingborg, where he lodges at the Kronhiorten, eating a meal comprising hunks of rye bread and cracklings, and sleeping above the stable, wrapped in stinking blankets. The next day he continues on to Køge and Copenhagen, munching on apples and pears he has stolen from a garden. Seated in the mail coach he wedges his boot against the seat opposite and endeavours to steer his way through an edition of Gulliver’s Travels . He reads of how the hero, abandoned in the land of giants, is cared for by a young woman twelve times his size. Morten rests the book upon his thigh, his index finger inserted between the pages. He has removed his wig and placed it on the seat beside him. He puts his brow to the pane of the pitching, heaving, lurching carriage and stares dreamily out upon the fields that ripple by. A maiden twelve times one’s own size, he thinks to himself. A mouth twelve times larger than normal, a tongue, hands, breasts, vulva. A veritable mountain landscape of a woman! He opens the book once more. Gulliver is marooned in countries whose people are either abnormally small or large, or else aberrant in other manners. But perhaps, Morten thinks, the aberration is in Gulliver himself; that is, in the author who has created him, and thereby in the reader who abandons himself to the story.
    He thinks of Rousseau and his words on the subject of human liberty, to which Kirstine alluded: Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains! Gulliver, too, is enchained to the man he is. Wherever he goes, he remains the same, unable to adapt, thus forever running into trouble with the natives of the various lands at which he arrives. Such a person will he, Morten Falck, never become, he will not stiffen into some fixed form and become old before his time. This he resolves now, in a mail coach trav­elling north along the bay of Køge Bugt.
    The journey is soon at an end. He glimpses the towers of Copenhagen and the wetland expanses of Amager, converses with his fellow passen­gers, one of whom passes round a hunk of yellow cheese, some bread and a bottle. He has felt anxious on behalf of his sister, a tiny lump of pain beneath the ribs, but his concern is revealed to be founded upon mere geography and hunger. As he nears Copenhagen with his stomach full, he feels cheerful once more.
    And then he is home. He walks through the gateway of the printer Schultz’s house in Nørregade with a whistle on his lips, turns right in the courtyard, ascends the stair, enters his room and deposits his sack in a corner. He lays his head upon the stained pillow of his bed above the printer’s machine that ticks and rattles, shudders and groans, knocks and bangs. He sighs with well-being. Gulliver slides from his hand. He sleeps.
    The royal city is ninety thousand people squeezed inside a rampart, enclosing them within an area that may be wandered through on foot in less than an hour. A city ravaged over centuries by epidemics, fires and a series of inebriate, insane, inbred and incompetent sovereigns. Yet still its population steadily rises and the pressure upon the ramparts increases with each year that passes. Morten notes that although most have but a short life ahead, followed by a painful and humiliating death, the people of the city see little hindrance to amusement. On the contrary. The city’s squares and places are alive with entertainers, gateways and street doors customarily occupied by prostitutes, and all would seem to indicate that they have no reason to be idle.
    Morten Falck strolls through the narrow streets whose buildings on each side seem to lean towards each other, allowing only a thin band of sky to show between their roofs. He walks across the expansive public squares, the great concourse before the new palace, a colossal and imper­ishable edifice of Norwegian granite. He