The Magus - John Fowles [134]
should be snatched out of his hands when he came to enjoy it. He could not see the objective truth, that destiny is hazard: nothing is unjust to all, though many things may be unjust to each. This sense of God's injustice smouldered in him. He refused to go to hospital to have his eyes looked at. He became red-hot for lack of the oil of objectivity, and so his soul both burnt in him and burnt him. He did not go to Seidevarre to meditate. But to hate. "Needless to say, I was eager to have a look at this religious maniac. And not altogether out of medical curiosity, because I had grown to like Gustav very much. I even tried to explain to him what psychiatry was, but he seemed uninterested. It is best left alone, was all he said. I promised him still to avoid the promontory. And there the matter was left. One windy day soon after, I had gone three or four miles south along the river, when I heard someone calling my name. It was Gustav in his boat. I stood out from the trees and he rowed towards me. I thought he had been netting sik, but he had come to find me. He wanted me to look at his brother. We were to remain hidden, to stalk and watch Henrik like a bird. Gustav explained that it was the right day. His brother had very sharp hearing and so the wind was in our favour. "I got into the boat and we rowed to a little beach near the end of the point. Gustav disappeared and then came back. He said Henrik was waiting near the _seide_, the Lapp dolmen. It was safe for us to visit his hut. We made our way through the trees up a small slope, passed over to the northern side, and there, where the trees were thickest, in a depression, was a curious cabin. It had been sunk into the ground, so that only the turf roof showed on three sides. On the fourth, where the ground fell away, there was a door and a small window. A stack of wood beside the house. But no other sign of any employment. "Gustav made me go in while he stayed on watch outside. It was very dark. As bare as a monastic cell. A truckle bed. A rough table. A tin with a bundle of candles. The only concession to comfort, an old stove. There was no carpet, no curtain. The lived-in parts of the room were fairly clean. But the corners were full of refuse. Old leaves, dirt, spiders' webs. An odour of unwashed clothes. There was one book, on the table by the one small window. A huge black Bible, with enormous print. Beside it, a magnifying glass. Pools of candlewax. "I lit one of the candles to look at the ceiling. Five or six beams that supported the roof had been scraped pale and along them had been carved two long brown-lettered texts from the Bible. They were in Norwegian, of course, but I noted down the references. And on a cross beam facing the door there was another sentence in Norwegian. "When I came out into the sunlight again I asked Gustav what the Norwegian sentence meant. He said, _Henrick Nygaard, cursed by God, wrote us in his own blood in the year 1912_. That was ten years before. Now I will read you the other two texts he had cut and then stained in with blood." Conchis opened the book beside him. "One was from Exodus: 'They encamped in the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire.' The other was an echo of the same text in the Apocrypha. Here. From Esdras: 'I gave you light in a pillar of fire, yet have you forgotten me, saith the Lord.' "These texts reminded me of Montaigne. You know he had forty-two proverbs and quotations painted across the beams of his study roof. But there was none of the sanity of Montaigne in Henrik. More the intensity of Pascal's famous _M�rial_--those two crucial hours in his life that he could afterwards describe only by one word: _feu_. Sometimes rooms seem to imbibe the spirit of the people who have lived in them--think of Savonarola's cell in Florence. And this was such a place. One did not have to know the occupant's past. The suffering, the agony, the mental sickness were as palpable as tumours. "I left the cabin and went cautiously towards the _seide_. It