Paradise Reclaimed by Halldor Laxness

Author:Halldor Laxness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427236
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

19

God’s City of Zion

The hoofbeats of cantering horses, large and small, sounded on the road, and the creak of axles and wheels. The foals that trotted behind looked confident but a little pensive. Men and women went riding past on important business, the women on saddles but the young boys riding bareback in pairs on old hacks, as they do in Iceland when they are herding cows. The neighbours stepped up on to the veranda to greet the visitor from Iceland. They asked for news of home. But no sooner had he started to talk than a distant look came into the eyes of the questioners. Iceland vanished as soon as its name was spoken. Their speech was as perfect, certainly, as the chirping of birds, and so polished on the outside and scrubbed on the inside that it took particular dexterity to introduce a foreign phrase; but if one used an old proverb or some well-known quotation from the sagas, people smiled amiably and absently, and had already forgotten it. The weather in Iceland last year and the year before last concerned them no more than the hydrocarbon halo around Sirius. News of men and affairs in Iceland only prompted them to expatiate on the great events of the present Kingdom of Saints and cite Joseph Smith’s Golden Book, or praise his successor Brigham Young, that chosen leader who towered over not only the mountains of the Territory of Utah but the whole of the western hemisphere as well. Iceland, with its little parish officials and low mountains, its ever-hungry soil-grubbers who composed ballads, and its one (at most) well-to-do person per district—was it any wonder that such a country, in the minds of these Zion-dwellers, had faded away to the far side of the moon? Seldom had a country been so utterly lost to a people as Iceland was to those Mormons.

Pastor Runólfur always took newcomers from Iceland into the enclosure to show them the sheep he looked after for Bishop Þjóðrekur, to let them admire how beautiful and thick their tails were compared with the stumps on Icelandic sheep.

This is the place, Brigham Young had said when the Mormons finally came down off the plateau on to the shoulders of the mountain and looked out over the great basin with its unbroken soil, spring streams and cool groves. The Mormons never tired of recalling how only half an hour after their arrival in the Promised Land they unloaded an apology of a plough from a ramshackle cart which some emaciated oxen had dragged step by step in the name of Jesus across the endless wastes of America; now these bullocks stood there with the placidly sullen expression of beasts in the Bible, with blood on their hooves, shaking their heads so that their slaver glistened in the blazing sun and drinking from a stream; and the men had started to plough.

After the stories about the trek across the wilderness came the episodes from the life of the

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