“Needless to say, I was eager to have a look at this religious maniac. And not altogether out of medical curiosity, because I had grown to like Gustav very much. I even tried to explain to him what psychiatry was, but he seemed uninterested. It is best left alone, was all he said. I promised him still to avoid the promontory. And there the matter was left.

One windy day soon after, I had gone three or four miles south along the river, when I heard someone calling my name. It was Gustav in his boat. I stood out from the trees and he rowed towards me. I thought he had been netting sik, but he had come to find me. He wanted me to look at his brother. We were to remain hidden, to stalk and watch Henrik like a bird. Gustav explained that it was the right day. His brother had very sharp hearing and so the wind was in our favor.

“I got into the boat and we rowed to a little beach near the end of the point. Gustav disappeared and then came back. He said Henrik was waiting near the seide, the Lapp dolmen. It was safe for us to visit his hut. We made our way through the trees up a small slope, passed over to the northern side, and there, where the trees were thickest, in a depression, was a curious cabin. It had been sunk into the ground, so that only the turf roof showed on three sides. On the fourth, where the ground fell away, there was a door and a small window. A stack of wood beside the house. But no other sign of any employment.

“Gustav made me go in while he stayed on watch outside. It was very dark. As bare as a monastic cell. A truckle bed. A rough table. A tin with a bundle of candles. The only concession to comfort, an old stove. There was no carpet, no curtain. The lived-in parts of the room were fairly clean. But the corners were full of refuse. Old leaves, dirt, spiders’ webs. An odor of unwashed clothes. There was one book, on the table by the one small window. A huge black Bible, with enormous print. Beside it, a magnifying glass. Pools of candlewax.

“I lit one of the candles to look at the ceiling. Five or six beams that supported the roof had been scraped pale and along them had been carved two long brown-lettered texts from the Bible. They were in Norwegian, of course, but I noted down the references. And on a cross beam facing the door there was another sentence in Norwegian.

“When I came out into the sunlight again I asked Gustav what the Norwegian sentence meant. He said, Henrick Nygaard, cursed by God, wrote us in his own blood in the year 1912. That was ten years before. Now I will read you the other two texts he had cut and then stained in with blood.”

Conchis opened the book beside him.

“One was from Exodus: 'They encamped in the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire.' The other was an echo of the same text in the Apocrypha. Here. From Esdras: 'I gave you light in a pillar of fire, yet have you forgotten me, saith the Lord.'

“These texts reminded me of Montaigne. You know he had forty-two proverbs and quotations painted across the beams of his study roof. But there was none of the sanity of Montaigne in Henrik. More the intensity of Pascal’s famous Mémorial—those two crucial hours in his life that he could afterwards describe only by one word: feu. Sometimes rooms seem to imbibe the spirit of the people who have lived in them—think of Savonarola’s cell in Florence. And this was such a place. One did not have to know the occupant’s past. The suffering, the agony, the mental sickness were as palpable as tumors.

“I left the cabin and went cautiously towards the seide. It came in sight through the trees. It was not a true dolmen, but simply a tall boulder that wind and frost had weathered into a picturesque shape. Gustav pointed. Some fifty yards away, on the far side of a clump of birches, hidden from the seide, stood a man. I focused my glasses on him. He was taller than Gustav, a thin man with rough-cut dark-gray hair and beard and an aquiline nose. He turned by chance and faced us and I had a full view of his gaunt face. What surprised me was its fierceness. A severity that was almost savagery. I had never seen a face that expressed such violent determination never to compromise, never to deviate. Never to smile. And what eyes! They were slightly exophthalmic, of the most startling cold blue. Beyond any doubt, insane eyes. Even at fifty yards I could see that. He wore an old indigo-black Lapp smock with faded red braid round its edges. Dark trousers and heavy snout-ended Lapp boots. And in his hand he held a staff.

“I watched this rare specimen of humanity for some time. I had expected to see some furtive creature, someone who mumbled to himself as he crept through the trees. Not this fierce blinded hawk of a man. Gustav nudged my arm again. The nephew appeared by the seide with a bucket and the milk can. He put them down, picked up another empty bucket that must have been set there by Henrik, looked round, and then cried something in Norwegian. Not very loud. He evidently knew where his father was, for he faced the clump of birches. Then he disappeared back through the trees. After five minutes Henrik began to walk up towards the seide, Quite confidently, but feeling his way with the end of the staff. He picked up the bucket and can, placing the staff under his arm, and then started back along the familiar path to his cabin. The path brought him within twenty yards of the birch scrub behind which we were standing. Just as he passed us I heard high overhead one of the frequent sounds of the river, a very beautiful one, like the calling of Tutankhamen’s trumpets. The flight cry of a black-throated diver. Henrik stopped, although the sound must have been as banal to him as the wind in the trees. He stood there, his face turned up towards the sky. Without emotion, without despair. But listening, waiting, as if it might be the first notes of the herald angels telling him the great visit was near.

“He went on out of sight and I returned to the farmstead with Gustav. I did not know what to say. I did not like to disappoint him, to admit defeat. I had my own foolish pride. After all, I was a foundermember of the Society of Reason. In the end I concocted a plan. I would visit Henrik alone. I would tell him I was a doctor and that I would like to look at his eyes. And while I looked at his eyes, I would try to look at his mind.

“I arrived outside Henrik’s hut at midday the next morning. It was raining slightly. A gray day. I knocked on the cabin door and stood back a few steps. There was a long pause. Then he appeared, dressed exactly as he had been the evening before. Face to face and close to him I was struck more than ever by his fierceness. It was very difficult to believe that he was nearly blind, because his eyes had such a pale, staring blueness. But now I was close to him I could see that it was a poorly focused stare; and I could also see the characteristic opacity of cataract in both eyes. He must have been very shocked, but he gave no sign of it. I asked him if he understood English—I knew from Gustav that he in fact did, but I wanted him to answer. All he did was to raise his staff, as if to keep me at bay. It was a warning rather than a threatening gesture. So I took it to mean that I could go on provided that I kept my distance.

“I explained that I was a doctor, that I was interested in birds, I had come to Seidavarre to study them—and so on. I spoke very slowly, remembering that he could not have heard the language for fifteen years or more. He listened to me without expression. I began to talk about modern methods of treatment for cataract. I was sure that a hospital could do something for him. All the time, not a single word. At last I fell silent.

“He turned and went back into the hut. He left the door open, so I waited. Suddenly he appeared again. In his hand he held what I held, Nicholas, when I came on you this afternoon. A long axe. But I knew at once that he was no more thinking of chopping wood than a berserk about to enter battle. He hesitated a moment, then rushed at me, swinging the axe up as he ran. If he had not been nearly blind be would beyond any doubt have killed me. As it was I sprang back only just in time. The axehead went deep into the soil. The two moments he took to jerk it free gave me the time to run.