“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.
“He came stumbling after me across the little clearing in front of the hut. I ran some thirty yards into the trees, but he stopped by the first one. At twenty feet he probably could not have told me from a tree trunk. He stood with the axe poised in his hands, listening, straining his eyes. He must have known I was watching him, for without warning he turned and swung the axe with all his strength into a silver birch just in front of him. It was a fair-sized tree. But it shook from top to bottom with the blow. And that was his answer. I was too frightened by the violence of the man to move. He stared a moment into the trees where I stood and then turned and walked into the hut, leaving the axe where it had struck.
“I went back to the farmstead a wiser young man. It seemed incredible to me that a man should reject medicine, reason, science so violently. But I felt that this man would have rejected everything else about me as well if he had known it—the pursuit of pleasure, of music, of reason, of medicine. That axe would have driven right through the skull of all our pleasure-orientated civilization. Our science, our psychoanalysis. To him all that was not the great meeting was what the Buddhists call lilas—the futile pursuit of triviality. And of course to have been concerned about his blindness would have been for him more futility. He wanted to be blind. It made it more likely that one day he would see.
Some days afterwards I was due to leave. On my last evening Gustav kept me talking very late. Of course I had said nothing to him of my visit. It was a windless night, but in August up there it begins to get cold. I went out of the barn to urinate when Gustav left. There was a brilliant moon, but in one of those late-summer skies of the extreme north, when day lingers even in the darkness and the sky has strange depths. Nights when new worlds seem always about to begin. I heard from across the water, from Seidevarre, a cry. For a moment I thought it must be some bird, but then I knew it could only be Henrik. I looked towards the farmstead. I could see Gustav had stopped, was standing outside, listening. Another cry came. It was dragged out, the cry of someone who is calling a great distance. I walked across the grass to Gustav. Is he in trouble, I asked. He shook his head, and remained staring out at the dark shadow of Seidevarre across the moon-gray water. What was he calling? Gustav said, ’do you hear me? I am here.' And then the two cries, with an interval between, came again and I could make out the Norwegian words. 'Horer du migP leg er her.' Henrik was calling to God.
“I told you how sounds carried at Seidevarre. Each time he called the cry seemed to stretch out infinitely, through the forest, over the water, into the stars. Then there were receding echoes. One or two shrill cries from distant disturbed birds. There was a noise from the farmstead behind us. I looked up, and saw a white figure at one of the upper windows—whether Ragnar or her daughter, I could not see. It was as if we were all under a spell.
“To break it, I began to question Gustav. Did he often call like this? He said, not often—three or four times a year, when there was no wind and a full moon. Did he ever cry other phrases? Gustav thought back. Yes—'I am waiting' was one. 'I am purified,' another. 'I am prepared,' another. But the two phrases we had heard were the ones he used most.
“I turned to Gustav and silently asked him if we could go again and see what Henrik was doing. Without answering, he nodded, and we set off. It took us some ten or fifteen minutes to get to the base of the point. Every so often we heard the cries. We came to the seide, but the cries were still some way off. Gustav said, 'He is at the end.' We passed the cabin, and walking as quietly as we could, made our way to the end of the point. At last we came through the trees.