From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon Page B

in him when they sighted the Faroe Islands during the voyage. At last Jónas was seeing with his own eyes something he had drawn on those maps of the world that he had been able at times to use as payment for hospitality or provisions when he and Sigga were on the run with their children. But instead of poring over paper, looking down from heaven as if with the eye of the highest flying bird, he himself was on the map. And he was seized by the conviction that when he set foot on Danish soil all roads would be open to him. For Jónas had reached the place where the white background on maps ends – that expanse which the draughtsman feels compelled to decorate with monsters and seahorses and floating polar bears to prevent the eye from growing bored of the ocean – he had reached land in a place that was strangely familiar to him, although hitherto he had known it only as his own handiwork, realised in birch ink and paint; faint, of course, to keep the place names legible. Being accustomed to thinking of the world as a picture that can be folded up and put away in one’s pocket, or a terse geographical treatise by a medieval historian, he had the impression that from where he was now it was but a short hop to all the main sites of history: south to Constantinople and the Holy Land, east to Sweden and Tartary, to Novaya Zemlya and Asia.
    But the sights that met his eyes were nothing to the assaults on his ears, for everything had its own attendant noise: rattling, cackling, shouting, banging, barking, jingling, neighing, belching, cracking, grunting, whining, clapping, and the thunderous footsteps of man and beast, running, limping, ambling, tramping. To be sure, Jónas could limit his field of vision by walking close behind Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur, eyes fixed between his shoulder blades – which he did despite his son’s constant complaints that he was treading on his heels – but he could not shut out the noise. He could not block his ears since both his hands were full. In one he was carrying a bundle of clothes belonging to their guide, a student from the south of Iceland who in return for help with his luggage was going to show them to a tolerable inn, while in the other he was holding the oblong box which reached from his fist down to his ankle. No, to have muffled the din of the city he would have had to pour wax in his ears.
    Jónas Pálmason the Learned was one of those people whose life is forever turning with the wheel of fortune. He had no sooner reached a safe haven than he was sent straight back out on to the stormy sea, and always in a leakier vessel than the one in which he had arrived. Father and son took rooms at an inn called the Sommerfugl, or Butterfly, which Jónas nicknamed ‘the Summer Snipe’ after the harbinger of summer on his island; a respectable lodging for decent men and a sign that Providence was apparently prepared to handle him and Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur with silk gloves from now on. Indeed, his stay at the inn was so delightful in comparison with his exile on the island or being tossed at sea on the merchant ship that for the first week he could not be persuaded to leave the house but lay all day long in bed, haltingly reading a recent edition of
Aesop’s Fables
. Besides, he was fairly insulated there from the hubbub of the city. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur on the other hand dashed all over town, working to resolve their case, which was the purpose of their journey after all: to obtain a royal writ dismissing the charges against them. He went hither and thither among those of their countrymen who he had reason to believe would be well disposed towards him and his father, asking their advice on how best to bring the matter to the attention of the king, for it would take no less than a handwritten, sealed writ from His Majesty King Christian IV to induce the judges of the Icelandic Althing to change their minds. And that was easier said than done. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur discovered