And there was dazzling light.
Jónas the Learned sits on a rock by the shore, gazing at this world which has silently merged into a single point of light. He has not taken his eyes off it since he sat down and the vision first began to take form, and now his pupils are like grains of sand, the protective film of tears has dried up; he urgently needs to blink but cannot lest the vision disappear before he can fix its details in his memory, which is essential if he is to interpret it. But in the end there is no avoiding it, either he must draw down the lids over his eyes or else he will go blind. He blinks. But instead of dissolving, the vision gains an addition: far to the north-west, in the angle of a cove where land meets sea in a glimmering mirage, a tiny black spot appears and begins slowly to move out into the bay. Careful not to lose sight of the sailing dot, Jónas shifts on his hard stone seat and takes a deep breath: this could be a long wait. He opens his eyes wide and keeps them like that until an infernal cramp seizes every muscle in his head, from the corners of his mouth to his crown, and his face is distorted into a ludicrous mask of suffering, but by then the dot has grown to the size of the smallest fingernail on an infant’s hand and the spectator dares to close his lids again for an instant. Next time Jónas looks at the dot it has changed shape and is no longer a dot but a diamond, a black diamond sliding over the silky smooth sea: it is the prow of a boat and that boat is making for the island.
There is a man standing in the bow — the watcher on shore squints in the hope of recognising him (could they be bringing him supplies?), but the light falls on the man’s back — as yet he is only the silhouette of a man — and he raises his right hand in a grand gesture, as if waving to Jónas Pálmason the Learned. Jónas is about to wave back but lets his hand fall in his lap when he sees that the greeting was assuredly not intended for him. For as soon as the man’s arm comes to a stop above his head there is such a whooshing of feathers that the wind blows from all directions at once as every last bird in the north obeys the man’s command, swiftly swooping in from land and sea. Whether they have been endowed with large wings or small, speckled coats or black stockings, whether they are short of beak or long of shank, with heather in their crop or sand eels in their gullet, the birds answer the summons and circle like a whirlwind over the man, calling, squawking, chirping, until each finds its place in the sky above his head. When the down finally ceases to snow from their wings, Jónas sees that the flock has formed a living fan over the boat, in which a pair of each species (cock and hen, drake and duck, gander and goose) has lined up according to size, from the wren, fluttering at shoulder height around the man in the bow, to the puffin which flaps frantically somewhat higher, to the piping whimbrel hovering above the mallard but below the cruel eagle, right up to the swans, cob and pen, beating wings so white that they rival the silvery firmament.
After studying this vision for a while, Jónas blinked, at which the man lowered his arm and pointed to the surface of the sea. In an instant the sea became as clear as a cool autumn evening and the boat appeared to be hanging in thin air rather than floating on water, for the ocean had grown so translucent that its bed could be seen far and wide, even to the horizon. Jónas saw now that the island was like a tapering peak; he sat not on a rock on the beach but on the edge of a precipice. Then the glassy sea began to boil, the deeps churned and now the fish came swimming with rapid flaps of their tails, from south and east, from the shallows by the shore and the trenches beyond. There were redfish and whiting, shark and plaice, sea scorpion and halibut, thorny skate and cod, herring and seal, and all the other fish Jónas the Learned knew and others he did not. Observing the same rule as the birds in the sky, they arranged themselves according to size, from the keel of the boat to the bottom of the sea, sticklebacks at the top, sperm whales at the bottom, and so many species in between that when each pair was in place the shoal spread out in the clear brine like a scallop shell, a glittering reflection of the flying fan above. There was no respite for Jónas’s eyes as he cast his gaze hither and thither between sky and sea, memorising the appearance of the birds and fishes, their similarities in colour and shape, redwing and redfish …
All the while this spectacle lasted, the boat slid ever closer to the island — moving of its own accord though there was no wind in that still, cloudless, dazzling world — and had Jónas paid any attention to the figure standing in the bow he would have seen that he was a man in his forties, clad in a coat of grey-brown or grey-speckled homespun, with a homespun hat of the same colour on his head, while under the brim could be glimpsed eyes that seemed to glow like glass orbs. The man swung his arm again, drawing the naturalist’s attention from the creatures of the heights and depths: this time he pointed to land. Then it appeared to Jónas as if in a revelation that from the shores of the sea to the peaks of the glacier a specimen of every kind of plant nourished by Icelandic soil tore itself willingly from mould and gravel — everything from the forget-me-not to the rowan tree — and the flowers of earth rose into the sky, light as mist from a mountain tarn. High in the sky, the grasses and herbs classed themselves according to their growth, twining together to form a vast garland that danced over the barren wastes, giving off a perfume so sweet that Jónas nearly swooned. But he had to stay awake for the spectacle was not over: now the land animals entered the stage on a mossy stone, the fox and the field mouse; the little mice perching serenely between the foxes’ ears.
The man in the boat repeated his last movement, drawing back his outstretched arm and swinging it to shore. The ground opened. The mountains soughed off their screes so that one could see deep into their bowels, where countless metals, crystals and precious stones lay on different ledges, sparkling and glittering, many ancient, others newborn, reddened by the glow of subterranean fires and bathed in the waters of underground rivers.
‘Yes, yes … Oh yes!’
Jónas Pálmason the Learned rocked on his boulder. Yes, there it was on the topmost seat, the highest ledge of all — that dearly bought metal that he had always suspected lay concealed in the unkind flesh of his motherland, the very blood of the earth: gold!
‘Did I not say so? They …’
He got no further. There was a blare of trumpets.
‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’
It is the swans, thrumming their vocal cords. The other creatures fall silent, the sea trout gently flicking its tail, the raven softly flapping its wings. The feathery trumpets sound a second time. Jónas looks up and realises that the boat is nearing land. He rises to go and meet the boatman, buttoning up his jacket, running a hand through his hair. But then he becomes aware that the fanfare was not intended to welcome the boat. Far out on the rim of the sea to the north appears a school of whales which swim rapidly south across the bay.
‘Hoo-hoo …’
The clarion call is to welcome these newcomers to the game. In a synchronised water dance they dive beneath the boat and shoot their heads out of the sea beyond: twelve narwhals from Greenland. They raise their twisted horns, seven ells long, to the sky, clash them together and cross them like the lances of a guard of honour, the whole dance conducted to the sound of high-pitched singing and a great splashing of fins. With this the vision is complete, an intricate, carefully thought-out coat of arms: