‘But by then,’ Mikkelsen says, ‘that kind of thing will be a matter of chance. Like now, with people becoming famous for nothing in particular. For instance: there are a hundred thousand girls with nice figures that no-one’s ever heard of, but only one of them will become Miss Universe and get her picture in the paper.’
‘Having nice boobs,’ Qvigstad says, ‘is different. There’s a whole lot of girls having a whole lot of fun thanks to their boobs. Without it getting in the papers, I mean, just on the home front. Don’t you think?’
‘On the home front there won’t be much call for mathematical genius, I gather, nor for the explorer’s spirit of adventure, what with machines being better at everything and there being nothing left to discover.’
‘Anyone aiming to be a famous scientist must be out of his mind,’ Qvigstad says.
Yes, that is what he said. I wonder what he is thinking. Is he trying to make me feel better?
‘Just as the iguanodon became extinct due to its size,’ he concludes, ‘so will the human race die out from sheer redundancy.’
32
My sleeping bag is still too wet. Better do without, then, and try sleeping in my clothes.
It is four o’clock. I have been checking my watch every half hour. Arne’s snoring and a gale is rising, making the tent flap like mad. Good: mosquitoes don’t like the wind. On the other hand, several bloodthirsty flies have sought shelter inside and are even now crawling under my shirt and into my sleeves. They don’t hurt, but they leave fat drops of blood in their wake. They don’t even try to escape their just deserts. I squash them with the tip of my index finger. Small black flies, smaller than the flies descending on the jam back home.
Raising myself on my elbow, I stare at Arne. He is lying on his side with his face turned to me and his hands under his cheek. His mouth is open, and I can see the full complement of his yellow, decaying teeth. The teeth of an old man. His whole face is timeworn. He looks as if he’s already outlived the lifespan of his body. I can see the whites of his eyes through his half-closed lids. The dense stubble on his jaws makes him appear ancient, but also decrepit and shabby. A giant tramp, a dim-witted troll whose only means of communication is grunting and snoring. The noise keeps me awake, as on previous nights. Nevertheless, I do drift off now and then, because I wake up the moment the snoring stops. Each time it means Arne has gone outside. I stare at the apex of the pyramid, the mosquitoes’ favourite rallying ground. I heave myself into a sitting position, a vile taste in my mouth. I take a long swig from the water bottle and light a cigarette. Keeping the insects at bay with waves of the hands combined with jets of smoke, I sit there for ten minutes or so, musing. When I reach the end of my cigarette I stick my hand out of the tent, make a hole in the ground with my finger and bury the stub.
I discover that I can’t raise my right knee. The leg is swollen and weirdly discoloured. But I can still walk on it, presumably. Walking will be a sight easier than getting a wet sock over the foot. To do that requires contortions painfully similar to indoor gymnastics, which is something I never went in for, even when I was a boy and such exertions did not hurt. Lunging forward over my stiff leg I finally succeed in getting the open end of the sock over my upturned toes. The other sock is not a problem. I get to my feet, step into my shoes and crawl outside. It’s half past ten.
Harsh sunshine.
The coffee pot, hooked from the end of a stick planted at an angle, is positioned over a small fire. There is nothing else to be seen. The green tent belonging to Mikkelsen and Qvigstad has vanished. What’s up now? I don’t see Arne either. Hobbling up the slope, I catch sight of him at the lakeside folding up the blue fishing net.
Glancing back and forth between him and the kettle, I can’t decide how I can best make myself usefuclass="underline" shall I go down to help Arne with the net or head back to tend the fire — but if I do that I won’t find out where Qvigstad and Mikkelsen have gone until later. The thin stick supporting the kettle is catching fire while the flames underneath are going out.
I limp back as fast as I can. It would be better if the kettle were propped up by stones, but there don’t seem to be any stones of the right size hereabouts, nor any stronger sticks. Getting a kettle of water to boil without a primus is a complicated business.
I go down on my knees to blow on the glowing embers, carefully slipping in bits of moss and twigs.
When Arne turns up with the net, the water is finally beginning to simmer. He hasn’t caught any fish.
‘Where are Qvigstad and Mikkelsen?’
‘They left about two hours ago.’
‘Oh, I was wondering where they’d got to. I expect they’ll be waiting for us with fried trout when we join them tonight.’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Why not?’
‘We’re going somewhere else. I’ll show you on the map.’
Arne goes off to fetch his map while I tip some ground coffee into the boiling water. Our meal will consist of knäckebröd with honey from a tube, because the powdered milk and the oats are in Qvigstads’s and Mikkelsen’s luggage.
Arne settles down with the map. I nerve myself to put the question foremost in my mind:
‘Was there any special reason why they left so suddenly?’
‘A special reason? How do you mean?’
‘I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to them.’
‘Oh, that. But you were still asleep.’
He unfolds the map and takes up his magnifying glass.
‘Are we supposed to be meeting them somewhere later on?’ I ask
‘No, I don’t think that will be possible.’
I sink down beside Arne. My moustache has grown long enough for me to draw the bristles in with my underlip, and I sit there chewing them while my thoughts drift vaguely from one gloomy consideration to the next.
Arne explains that it was something to do with Qvigstad’s research that made him and Mikkelsen decide to head north, after which they plan to return to Skoganvarre by way of Mount Vuorje.
‘For us, though, it’s best if we go south — down to here …,’and he points to a thin dotted line which on an ordinary map would represent a road, but evidently not on this one.
Our route, he declares, means following a trail that is only ten centimetres wide and hardly visible in the terrain, although it’s marked with stones. That’s to say, any sizeable stone along the way has a smaller stone on top, left there by previous travellers. This way of marking a trail is widespread in Norway.
Messages used to be carried along this route in the old days. From each marker stone the next one can usually be seen some way off, indicating the direction to be followed. It is customary for everyone using the trail to replace any pebble that might be missing from a big stone for one reason or another: displaced by the wind, or by melting snow. Because not only on the map is it a dotted line — it is in reality, too. With gaps of several hundred metres at times, where the trail has been erased, washed away or overgrown.
He puts aside his magnifying glass to pour coffee into our cups and squeeze honey onto pieces of knäckebröd. I take another look at the map, wondering whether Arne’s planned itinerary will be to my advantage. Once we hit the trail with the marker stones we go east until we arrive at a place called Ravnastua. It’s marked on the map, but isn’t really a village or even a hamlet. Arne says there’s just one main house inhabited by Lapps and some annexes that serve as guest quarters. Hardly anyone goes there, of course, even in the summer. The place is maintained by the state as a refuge in the inhospitable wilderness. The nearest settlement is Karasjok, but the journey from there to Ravnastua is too long and too arduous to attract tourists, apparently. You might see the occasional eccentric angler, or a stray biologist or geologist, or a Lapp fallen on hard times. Arne has been to Ravnastua twice, and both times he was the only guest. Food and other necessities are delivered with caterpillar vehicles.