He has been at it a full three quarters of an hour. I get up and saunter about, without straying far from his side.
I don’t dare sit down again, afraid it will look like leaving him in the lurch. After all, if he made a catch he would share it with me. But I don’t know how to be of assistance. Now and then I mutter directions, offer advice I don’t believe in myself.
I haven’t been to the lavatory all day. Behind the house is a copse that would do very well, a hillock with a few trees. But I feel obliged to wait until the hook has come loose.
Finally Arne takes a running jump and lands on a big stone jutting out of the water. From there he can exert more upward pull. Bingo! He immediately casts back the line and lands a fish, but it is far too small.
The anglers and their offspring come past with the squelching sound of damp feet in rubber boots. The clouds thicken, but are still rimmed with pink. Our shadows dissolve. I am seized with an absurd craving for total darkness. Sleeping when it’s still light seems to diminish each hour of sleep by half.
When Arne finally heads back to the house, I climb the hillock. Between the trees I loosen my trousers, slide them down along with my underpants and sink onto my haunches. The mosquitoes make for my calves, thighs, buttocks, balls. I see Arne stepping onto the porch, while I frantically brush my hands along the parts of me that are exposed. It has to be a very quick business, as they say. My eyes are popping. Primal instincts stirring in man, as when a dog or cat marks territory far afield. I have to laugh as I wipe my backside with moss.
In the conservatory.
Arne has opened a box of knäckebröd, a packet of margarine and a tin of minced meat.
I roll out our sleeping bags on the floor.
The door is clad with wire mesh, in which rust has corroded several holes. Flies now enter as well, attracted by the margarine.
We sit on our sleeping bags munching our crackers, with our maps spread out on the floor.
‘How kind of these people,’ I say (no sign of them yet), ‘to let us use their porch. Any chance they might be able to find us a horse, d’ you think?’
‘I doubt it. But perhaps Qvigstad has come up with some idea.’
‘What if he hasn’ t?’
‘In that case we’ll just have to carry everything ourselves.’
‘I haven’t seen any horses around at all.’
‘Not a horse for miles round.’
‘Couldn’t we get a helicopter to drop us supplies on the way?’
(I say this in a joking tone of voice, but why should it be just a joke?)
‘Good idea,’ Arne says, ‘we’ll ask the Rockefeller Foundation, shall we? By the way, have you got any aerial photographs?’
‘No, have you?’
‘I don’t need them myself. But for the kind of research you’re doing … If it had been me, I’d have made sure I had some.’
‘I asked Nummedal for them. Before I left Amsterdam, Sibbelee said Nummedal would let me have them. But when I spoke to Nummedal he told me I should apply for them in Trondheim, from Direktør Hvalbiff. Hvalbiff wasn’t there, but I told you all that already. They did have aerial photographs, but the catalogue hadn’t been unpacked yet and might still have been back in Oslo. I didn’t dare tell you at first, I feel a right idiot not having them.’
‘You can always pick them up in Trondheim afterwards, on your way back. Then you can examine them at leisure when you get home. Reverse order,’ he says with a chuckle.
Through my clothes I scratch my thighs, my buttocks. The mosquito bites make my balls feel as if they’ re stubbled with horsehair. Arne fishes the last scrap of meat out of the tin and brings it to his mouth on the tip of his knife.
Could I be right in thinking he has not entirely dismissed the aerial photographs from his mind? Why do I have the feeling he is still pondering the subject? Maybe I am imagining I can read his mind simply because my own is so pre-occupied with the photographs. I really ought to have them with me now, to be able to compare pictures taken from a plane with what you see on the ground. Arne just said that to keep me happy. He licks the blade with the kind of discretion only found in those unaccustomed to using a knife in this manner. He puts it down and, keeping his eyes lowered, wipes his mouth with a paper handkerchief, or rather dabs at it gently.
Abruptly, he raises his eyes and fixes me.
‘Tell me, Alfred, what’s your main field of interest? What specifically, I mean.’
I trace a circle on one of the maps with my index finger.
‘These holes … They are generally taken to be dead-ice holes, aren’t they?’
Arne leans over for a closer look.
‘Yes, well, there are claims nowadays that some of them could be pingos.’
‘Ah, pingos, the last word in geology! But do you know what Sibbelee thinks? That they’ re meteor craters.’
‘Meteor craters?’
Arne’s jaw drops, making his face even longer than normal. His eyes, however, are steely.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘meteor craters — a new perspective, and one I find very appealing. Especially in a landscape like this …’
He is so astonished by what little I have said that he can’t stop himself interrupting:
‘But this landscape consists entirely of rocks and sand deposited by glaciers in the Ice Age. When the climate improved and the glaciers melted, this place turned into a mash of stones and sand and clay with the occasional wedge of ice. The ice-wedges thawed eventually as well, creating the holes we see now, which are usually filled with water. Such depressions are to be found wherever there was once land ice — northern Germany, say, or North America. What reason is there to think of meteors?’
‘Surely not everything need be attributed to the ice?’
I sigh, but haven’t finished yet:
‘One of the striking things about those holes is that they’ re always more or less round.’
‘Anything that melts becomes more or less round. Ice-wedges and meteors both become round.’
‘You think so?’
‘Why would a large meteorite be any rounder than a wedge of ice?’
Why indeed? After a pause I say:
‘Still, it’s a very interesting hypothesis. I’m going to do my utmost to prove that some of those holes are meteor craters. I get palpitations just thinking about it.’
‘Better not think about it too much then.’
‘I’m ambitious. I can’t help it, even though I know where I got it from. My father was a promising botanist when he was killed in an accident, just before my seventh birthday. He fell into a crevasse, in Switzerland. A few days after we heard of his death, a letter arrived saying that my father had been given a professorship. The speakers at his funeral weren’t sure whether to refer to him as Professor Issendorf or as Mr Issendorf. My mother brought me up to believe I was destined to make up for his broken career by being successful in my own. In other words, it would be truly sensational if I were able to prove that some of those holes are in fact impact craters. And also interesting for the layman, now that there’s so much stuff being written about craters on the moon.’
‘Yes.’
Arne gives me a tight-lipped smile, and then, while his eyes continue to smile more from pity than from derision, he opens his mouth the way people do when they are about to share a secret (this is a special way).
‘Your professor, Professor Sibbelee, he’s been advancing this idea for quite some time. Were you aware of that?’
‘Of course. But how did you know?’
‘I don’t want to discourage you, but Sibbelee told Nummedal about that meteorite theory of his ages ago. Nummedal was in the habit of mentioning it during his lectures, when he thought the moment had come for a bit of comic relief.’
‘Oh well, I suppose that’s because Nummedal himself wrote a book on the subject, in which he interprets the holes as dead-ice formations. Nobody contradicted him for fifty years. So what good would it do Nummedal to take a different view in his old age? Why would he abandon his own life’s work?’