A shame, said Øistein, shaking his head. Can we spare her a bit of ours?
Of course, only—
Now go take a turn on deck, and I’ll mind our goods.
Thank you, husband.
He sat there in the close air, passing the time with a Suldal man named Bendik Hermansson, whose brother had already emigrated to that district called Minnesota. By all accounts, a man had room to breathe over there. The Indians used to make trouble in those parts, but nowadays they were practically finished. Land and cattle were cheap. Øistein listened, embellishing his own dreams for himself and Kristina once the passage should widen out into American infinitude. Like most of the others, he had a gift for patient endurance, so that the hours receded easily, green and grooved like Norwegian islands. When Kristina returned, looking much better, they lunched on hard bread and tinned herring from Mr. Kielland’s store.
It was best not to be overexacting in one’s expectations as to the duration of the short passage. Captain Gull had said something about three weeks. But of course it might go a week more or less, depending on accidents. Anyone from Stavanger knew about stormy weather, not that any was in the immediate offing, for when Øistein climbed the ladder to the foredeck, the late afternoon sun peeped out to gild a lovely tree-hedgehog of coast, and off the stern lay a pastel island of high yellow and green shadows, the ocean almost reddish-grey against it. Ahead stretched a promontory of some sort. The Hyndla was sailing parallel to a cloud-pleat, aiming for a ridge of blue knuckles (the sea very calm, the glass falling slowly). Two sailors footed in another sail. Bendik Hermansson, who had also sought out good air just now, remarked that he had never seen such peculiar seamanship. Øistein declined to reply, for he had begun to wonder whether this fellow talked too much to no purpose. So they stood smoking their pipes while the glass fell a trifle further, and presently the waves roughened, so that the grey sea was sliming the scuttles belowdecks as the grey coast grew blurry. Preferring to delay his return into the odors of vomit, fish-oil and fouled diapers, Øistein remained on deck for another half-hour, until one of the Suldal men said he could make out some sort of high black shining, about two or three points on the starboard bow.
Now the sea began to foam in earnest, and waves rained down across the scuttles. The passengers were all good Norwegians, even the landsmen, so however they might have felt, they showed no fear of those glassy, icy sheets of spray in the milky sea. Presently the horizon disclosed mountains like the long black teeth of a wool comb. Øistein, who had never sailed far up the coast, but trusted in his calculations of how far the Hyndla had gone, supposed that this might be Ytre Sula or Sandøyna, not that either place boasted cliffs as grand or dark as this.
Passengers to their berths, said Captain Gull. The sailors were already unreefing the mainsail, an action which the former herring fishermen among the emigrants thought incomprehensible. Now the foresail had descended, and they were winching down the spar.
Belowdecks the four-tiered berths ran perpendicular to the ship’s axis, interrupted by a narrow corridor. At the top of each bunk on its corridor-facing end was a knurled knob whose purpose Øistein had not perceived. Two tall sailors now came in and gave each knob seven turns. With each turn the berths contracted a little into the wall. Kristina inquired what they were doing. A sailor said: You’ll see. It’s a narrow passage.
And so they approached a cliff of hard grey rock, which suddenly gaped open for the Hyndla to enter, then closed behind her. All the passengers could tell was that the scuttles went dark — for the passage was as narrow as the Vågen itself, that long sea-mouth whose jaws are studded with hordes of white wooden house-teeth.
Following up his earlier supposition, Øistein decided that they must have turned in to the Sognefjorden, which is the widest introitus hereabouts, but not a single town appeared; moreover, two of the Suldal men had fished the fjord as far up as Balestrand on many an occasion, and they swore that this was no place they had ever seen. Bendik Hermansson, however, was certain of their proximity to Balestrand, for there was nowhere else that they could be. Now it is common knowledge that as it runs upstream at Balestrand, the Sognefjorden jogs sharply north by northeast and narrows into the Færlandsfjorden, presently passing Sogndalseggi to the east before reaching the many-armed spider-lake called Jostedalsbreen. Even if they could have somehow missed Sogndalseggi, which was practically impossible, the Suldal men said, the channel should have widened out. And why they should be carried deep inside Norway was beyond them. Bendik Hermansson persisted in his position that they had not yet reached Balestrand. Once Øistein, who was of a practical disposition, realized that they knew no better than he where the Hyndla had carried them, he returned to his berth to see how his wife was getting along. Reverend Johansen sat on a trunk, reading aloud from his Bible. An old man was groaning and vomiting. The women knitted. Kristina had grown quite fond of the minister, and in truth she might have wondered once or twice how it would have gone with her, had she married so distinguished a man. He had just come to the verse which runs: Carry me, O LORD, that I may cross this circle of guttering fire; and against my enemies lend me Your sword that strikes on its own. Against the trolls deliver me; from the blue flames deliver me, that I may come safe into the Kingdom.
There was a fisherman named Einar Sigvatsson, who had sailed widely in the days when people still hoped that the herring might be found. His brother had finally persuaded him to go out of the country. So both Sigvatssons were on board, with their wives and children, together with Einar’s mother-in-law. Kristina and Øistein had struck up a liking for that family.
Coming back on deck once the whistle sounded the all-clear, Øistein discovered that the Hyndla appeared considerably smaller, for not only had all her sails disappeared but even the mast was broken down, its lowest stalk lashed tight against the deck and the remainder unscrewed into lengths of pole. Meanwhile the sailors were already turning certain knurled knobs upon the corners of the forecastle cabin, so that its roof crept down toward the deck. This accomplished, they unstepped the walls to fold them in. Now they turned other screws, and all along either side of the Hyndla uprose a low wall of oarlocks.
They had entered a very deep and narrow gorge, whose river, strange to say, flowed away from the sea. Overhead Øistein saw unfamiliar stars. This river was very dark, so that its ripples resembled silver inlay in a black iron axehead. Øistein stood watching for a long time, while the other passengers murmured around him. Presently there came a sort of dawn, and he began to perceive that the cliffs between which they sailed were white-patterned with petroglyphs of long ships which resembled worms rolling up their necks in agony because they had been pierced with upright rows of little sticks, which must have been either their masts or their passengers. Then the cliffs drew apart, so that he commenced to hope that the short passage might become more quotidian, but soon enough he saw that they had merely passed into a long ovoid lake, with a rocky islet in the middle; and evidently the cliffs closed in again not far ahead.
He wondered how Kristina might be faring belowdecks. At that moment she was quieting Einar Sigvatsson’s daughter Ingigerd, who was a fine girl, well brought up, but passing fearful of the dark, as it now came out; so Kristina entertained her with tales of the cannery, where she used to stand with the other girls at the gutting tables, her toil lit by candles planted in heaps of herring. Ingigerd inquired whether she had been afraid. — Kristina laughed at her. — Afraid or not, child, we did the work. Now don’t worry. Your father will come down for you soon.