The Promised Land

Soil

First Book

Chapter I

It was in a year towards the end of seventies.

For eight days, terrible weather had raged over the countryside. On the wings of violently jagged black and blue clouds the storm had swept in from the east, whisked the water of the fjord into foam, and thrown large pieces far inland onto the fields. There, the storm had wholly uprooted the farmers' winter crops in many places; trampled the reeds and rushes in the bogs; seared the meadows; and choked the ditches with mud and sand so that the water, not finding an outlet, spread across the fields and the roads. In every direction fallen trees, shattered telegraph poles, overturned stacks of seed, and dead birds thrown to the ground by the storm and killed in an instant could be seen.

In the little village of Vejlby, which lay quite unprotected on the top of a large hill, an old barn blew down one night with such a crash that people all across the village had sprung out of their beds and rushed into the street in their undergarments. Twelve chimney pots were blown down the same night, and in the garden of the parsonage whole flowerbeds had been uprooted and all the starlings' nest boxes torn from the trees. The heavenly powers had not even spared the rural dean himself; one afternoon while the storm was at its peak, when the dean had stepped out onto his veranda to survey the destruction, the wind seized the hat from his white head, threw it to the ground like a ball, trundled it down the road, and, despite all efforts, swept it away in a swirling dust cloud. Only far down the road, in a ditch behind some blackthorn bushes, did the wind relinquish its prey to throw itself upon a little girl who lived beyond the common and who was struggling homewards from school weeping into the wind. With shrieks and howls as from a hundred devils the wind enveloped the worn-out little creature, puffed up her skirts, and drove her nearer and nearer the edge of the road until it at last toppled her by a corner-post and sent her rolling with desperate cries down into a cold, old gravel pit. There her little curled-up body was found the next day by the searchers, still pressing her new catechism tightly to her chest.

Not in living memory had such terrible weather been known.

"May the Lord have mercy on those at sea," the people shouted to each other through the din when they met in the streets as they fought their way forward step by step with heads bowed down, or flying along with the storm in their back.

"Lucky are those who have sealed and thatched," thought the people who sat at home in half-dark rooms where they could hardly see to read the newspaper even in the middle of the day while the wind howled and whistled around them as if evil spirits had been let loose. In the stables the horses stood with pricked ears, shaking with fear; the cows bellowed as if fire had broken out; even the cats went about mewing sickly, and the dogs sniffed the air uneasily with their tails between their legs.

When the storm finally began to subside, the snow came tumbling in white hordes, and though it was still early winter, the beginning of December, the snow remained on the ground, filling the ditches, hiding the fallen trees along the roads, piling up against the broken fences on the fields, and covering the torn thatch roofs.

For three entire days and nights, it was as if heaven and earth merged to become one.

By then people had quietly begun to search their hearts and to make up accounts with the Almighty himself, believing that the Day of Judgment was at hand. Even on the evening of the third day, when people could begin shoveling away the snowdrifts from doors and sweeping inch-thick cakes of snow from windowpanes, more than one of those standing on their door-steps in the incipient moonlight peering out across the desolate blue-white wasteland which had supplanted land and fjord wondered to themselves what all this could "be against". That is to say, was it not possibly an omen, a heavenly proclamation of some momentous event, which in the coming time would befall the village or the parish, or perhaps the whole country?