The Boat in the Evening by Tarjei Vesaas Read Free Book Online Page A

approached in a way that we did not understand.
    We thought of it as air, but knew it was the glow from something approaching, just as the sun with its light was approaching over a hill to greet us. Our senses alert, we watched it coming from the opposite direction. We compared it fleetingly and haphazardly to many things. We did not compare the enchantment to anything; it was simply enchantment.
    *
    And indeed the enchantment sprang up around us in our own landscape as never before, in unexpected forms. In our happy bewitchment we suddenly saw a naked girl at the top of a rock on the other side of the sound. Our own familiar narrow sound. Quite incredibly, she stood there waiting, erect and immovable like ourselves. Like ourselves she was turned towards what was coming, and we understood her so well: understood why she had stripped to face this. We did not know who she was, we did not know where she came from.
    When we saw the girl thus confident
    as if sprung out of our own thoughts,
    on the bank of our own narrow sound,
    everything seemed to us to be gentler
    within us and without.
    We could not yet come closer to it.
    We could only stand there.
    We said nothing about it to each other,
    but saw that the other saw,
    so it was no fantasy.
    She had stripped to face the same event as us.
    In silence also we saw the gleam grow stronger up on the uneven hillside we were watching.
    Perhaps the trees and tussocks of heather up there would soon catch fire? Surely they would not be able to withstand the flames?
    But it was not like that either. At the same moment we saw that they did not begin to bum before the still hidden storm of light—we were expecting too much all at once in our excitement.
    We were expecting fire, but something else too that would abruptly and decisively clarify the clouded future, tell us the truth from this day onwards, one early summer morning.
    Everything we had wished for, somehow.
    More than wished for.
    Had wildly wished for.
    We included the girl over there across the sound. She was standing as before, waiting as silently as us.
    *
    So it had been worthwhile wishing so wildly.
    Was it not our innermost wish we now saw gleaming in the air?
    We were seeing it on its way at last, at the moment when it would soon break over the threshold within us, when it could no longer be stopped by doubt.
    The incredible is approaching from over there. It will not leap past us, we shall not be left in our dark vale to watch it go.
    What form it had was not our concern. Whether the bush burned or not—not our concern. Our concern was a blazing field of light. Our wish was for explanation. Our concern was what we did not know. We had form on the other side of the sound. We saw it with our boys’ eyes, proud that such should exist on our own home ground. We included that in the shared mood of exhilaration we were in. Our naked girl would enter the approaching field of light as an assured point of rest, as a kind of quivering anchorage in what we, in spite of everything, possessed.
    We did not know her, as she stood there sparkling, but she was one of us. We almost felt that it was we who had come to meet her.
    *
    We stiffened: there it was up on the hill, shining among the trees and bushes.
    First only as light.
    Nothing caught fire there, but the sight of it was so strong that it blinded us.
    We did not see whether it was the light of truth; there were horses, horses, a wave of shining horses, or a waterfall of them.
    A waterfall of horses over the crest, pouring down our hillside like an unpent dam. But without noise, soundless as the shadows and the light. This light would fill us, we would become capable of doing something remarkable, we suddenly persuaded ourselves.
    *
    Hush, we thought as the searing notion presented itself—that we were in reality seeing nothing, but that instead we were about to die. Thus it could shift and become distorted in the space of a moment.
    Why is nobody riding on the