The Boat in the Evening by Tarjei Vesaas

them. How far up will he walk? But he is walking quickly so far—considering how steep the road is and how hot the day. It looks as if some strong incentive is driving him on.
    What does he want?
    He is a man with the heart of a bird. It is fitting that he should be walking here above dizzy heights, with the blue air beneath him.
    He is just walking. He rounds another bend. The ascent and the sunshine make him breathe heavily. He is not a bird in everything.
    He seems to be pushed forward by his own hot breath, on this road where nobody walks. It is good enough testimony that he is on the road at all. He is searching for something. It looks as if he is driven to it.
    He is already beginning to peer upwards along the steep walls of rock to his left. He never crosses over to the other side of the road, although the most beautiful view is to be had from there. He does not look down into the valley. He looks quickly and searchingly at every new chunk of rock that comes into view as he rounds the bends. He is obviously expecting to find something.
    How has he found out about it? No one is likely to have told him.
    He is a young man.
    There’s that too. A young man.
    Curious not to go over to the edge where the view is, and the freedom puts flight into one’s brain. Instead he scans the confining rock wall where it is difficult to breathe and the sun’s heat is burning.
    So he must know about something that is irresistible to someone like himself.
    The one bend after the other. Irresistible. He has a young heart, which cannot find rest. All it can do is search, and never mind about the result. The heat from the walls meets his own burning urge to walk, and to walk fast. He does not pause, scanning the walls as he walks.
    Perhaps he knows about something and is afraid of it, but must see it, must find it. And find it alone. He walks like one who is very much alone.
    A delicate trickling meets his ear as he rounds a bend. He starts in surprise at first, but there is no cause for alarm, it is water, trickling right out of the rock and down into a mossgrown horse trough hewn out of stone.
    A memento of time past. The water still trickles out of the stone, from a vein that never dries up, still cold in the extreme heat. A welcome sight. The man looks round him before bending down to drink. In the trough he encounters his own face and avoids looking at it, drinking the refreshing mountain water quickly and walking on.
    He looks with the same suspense as before at everything along the roadside. There is not much to see. He walks like a tired, frightened boy, but with the bird’s heart, which he cannot help having.
    Bend after bend.
    The sun strikes his back. Utter stillness. The scraping of his footsteps in the gravel the only sound.
    And then he is there.
    The bends have become sharper. In his suspense he has not noticed.
    *
    Sharper—so that he comes on the thing all of a sudden. It is the loop. The dead noose hanging from the crevice. Right in front of him all of a sudden. Twice the height of a man up the rock wall. It resembles a tree-root that has looped itself unexpectedly in the air, and then turned and crawled in again.
    The young man looks at it. It does not seem important hanging there. A loop like that hanging without reason, in burning sun. But he does not move a muscle, so fascinated is he. Unable to take his eyes off it.
    He knew about it all the time. Here it is, and now matters must take their course.
    Something is happening, unseen. And there is no name for it. An encounter between the young man and this object in the rock that looks like a loop. An encounter between what he possesses himself and what has been biding its time here, and is ready to meet him now.
    He stands still as they meet.
    No, they are not meeting yet, they have not come so far. This is only an initiation, an opening.
    He receives images of things he did not know about, and hints of things over which he has no control, being