The Snake Pit

H
ESTVIKEN
had been a seat of chieftains in old time. Traces of many great boat-sheds could still be seen by the waterside, and rotting logs strewed the slope over which the Hestvik men had drawn their longships in spring and autumn. They showed like the remains of an old roller-way, reaching from high-water mark up to the little plain between the crags.

Then Christian faith and morals came to Norway; Saint Olav forbade his subjects to go a-viking. Men were to believe, whether they liked it or no, that God will not suffer a man to rob his even Christian, even though he be of strange race. The Hestvik men sailed on merchant voyages, and from of old shipbuilding had been carried on at Hestviken. Even Olav Ribbung, while he was in his best years, kept a shipwright at his manor, and when, after the Birchlegs
¹
had burned Hestviken, he rebuilt both the manor farm on the high ground and the houses by the shore, he set up the boat-house and the two sheds and the workshop as they stood to this day down by the hithe.

A couple of hours’ rowing southward from the Thingstead, Haugsvik, brings one to a lofty crag; this great dull-red rock, which falls abruptly to the fiord and is bare of trees to near its summit, is called the Bull. Behind the point Hestviken runs up into the land; it is a small and rather narrow creek. On its northern side the Bull Crag falls sheer into the sea, and below it is deep, dark water. Upon the neck of the Bull grow sparse and wind-bent firs, but they thicken farther up the height—the promontory is like a foot thrust out into the sea from the low ridge, which extends on the whole northern side of the inlet and of Hestviksdal or Kverndal, as it is also called,
²
eastward into the heart of the district.
Inland along the valley the ridge falls steeply to the watercourse—a little stream runs through Kverndal and comes out into the sea at the head of the creek. Here trees and grass and flowers grow luxuriantly among cliffs and screes, and the ridge itself is thickly wooded with spruce; but as it descends to the level ground this passes into foliage, with many oaks even, belonging to Hestviken.

On the south side of the creek the rocks are rounded off into the fiord, much lower and less steep; juniper bushes combed flat by the wind and thickets of brier grow in the crevices of the rock, and here and there are short stretches of dry turf. But then the hill rises in a sheer cliff, dark grey and almost bare, facing north; and underneath this crag, which is called the Horse,
³
lies the manor, fairly high up and turned toward the north. The path from the hithe up to the houses runs along the edge of the manor fields on the fiord side and is fairly steep. Farther inland there is deep and good soil on the slopes, and fields and meadows suffer less from drought than in most other places on the Oslo Fiord, as many runnels trickle down from the Horse Crag, and higher up, the valley is somewhat moist. But almost all the plough-land of Hestviken lies on the south side of the valley and faces north.

The manor farm of Hestviken was built so that the houses stood in two rows enclosing a long and narrow courtyard, in which the bare rock cropped out everywhere like a ridge through the midst of it. Between this rock and the Horse Crag there was a hollow, marshy from the water trickling down the cliff, and the buildings on that side of the courtyard had therefore sunk and become damp; the logs of the lowest courses on the side facing the rock had rotted, so that the houses were draughty and the damp came in both above and below, but in summer nettles and weeds grew in the hollow, almost to the height of the turf roof. It was the stables, byres, and a few sheds that stood here.

Toward the sea, on the north side of the courtyard, lay the dwelling-houses, the cook-house, and the storehouses. Looking up the fiord the view was shut in by the Bull; but from the western end of the courtyard one could look across the creek to Hudrheimsland and southward a great way down Folden.
⁴
And in
former days the lords of Hestviken, when there was war in the land, had been wont to keep a watch on the hill above the Bull; the turf hut was still there in which the watchmen had lived when they relieved one another on the lookout.

At the end of the courtyard, toward the meadows and Kverndal and a good way from the other houses, stood the barn, all that was left of the old manor. It was immense and strongly built, of heavy timber. The other houses were small and without embellishment, of somewhat light logs bonded together. It had been no easy matter for Olav Ribbung to rebuild his manor after the fire—his losses had been great, as his warehouses were crammed full of goods at the time of the burning, and in those days it was often difficult for landlords to get in what their tenants owed them. But it was the tradition of the neighbourhood that the old houses at Hestviken had been large and splendid. There had been a hall, built of upright staves with a shingle roof like a church; two rows of carven pillars supported the roof internally, and the hall was richly decorated besides with wood-carving and painting. And for high festivals they had blue hangings and a tapestry that was spread under the roof; it was of red woollen stuff embroidered with fair images. Of this tapestry two pieces still remained—one that had been given to the church and one that was in the manor; this latter piece was so long that it stretched over both sides and the end wall of the new living-room, and yet a part of the tapestry was said to be lost—so one could imagine the difference in size between the old hall and Olav Ribbung’s house. Apart from this no more was left of the old glories than a carven plank, which people said one of Olav’s house-carls had torn out to defend himself with as he ran from the burning hall. In the new house this plank was one of the doorposts of the bedchamber.

Olav Audunsson knew it again the moment he stepped into his own house, which he had not seen since he was a child of seven years. Never had he thought of this carving or known that he remembered it—but the moment his eye fell upon it, recognition came like a gust of wind that passes over the surface of a lake and darkens it: ’twas the doorpost of his childhood. The image of a man was carven upon it surrounded by snakes; they filled the whole surface with their windings and twistings, coiling about the man’s limbs and body, while one bit him to the heart. A harp lay
trampled under his feet—it was surely Gunnar Gjukesson in the snake pit.
⁵

This doorpost was the only ornament of the hall, which was otherwise no different from the hearth-room of an ordinary farmstead; an oblong rectangular house, divided off by a wooden partition near the east end, so as to make two little rooms beyond the hall: the bed-closet at the far end and an antechamber by the door leading to the courtyard; for safety’s sake the entrance was placed as far as possible from the sea. At the other end, farthest from the door, were two box-beds with a raised floor between them, and along both side-walls ran benches packed with earth. Of movable furniture there was none but a few three-legged stools—not so much as a side-table by the antechamber door or a backed chair or settle. The top of a long table hung on the north wall, but it could not have been taken down and used many times since Olav Ribbung’s death.

The bed within the closet was intended for the master and mistress. But Olav Audunsson bade his old kinsman Olav Ingolfsson use this resting-place in which he had slept hitherto; he himself would take the bed on the south of the hall, where he had slept as a child.

He had no desire to move into the bed-closet. At the sight of the doorway leading to the pitch-dark room, ghosts of his childish loathing of this black hole arose within him. There his greatgrandfather had slept, with his mad son, and when the fit came upon Foulbeard, they bound him and he lay roaring and howling and tossing in his bonds on the floor in the darkness. The child had been—not so badly frightened; in any case it was a kind of calm and composed horror, for he had been a witness of Foulbeard’s attacks as far back as he could remember, and the madman had never harmed anyone; that he might do some hurt upon himself was all they had to fear. But of his own free will the boy never went near the closet—and indeed there was always a terrible stench within; a breath of pestilential air met him whenever he approached the doorway. His father and Aasa, the old serving-woman, did their best to clean up the madman’s lodging, but it
was difficult, so dark was it within. They changed the straw of the bed when they could come at it and strewed fresh mould on the floor so often that from time to time old Olav had to have it dug and carried out again, as the floor of the closet grew into hills and mountains. But all this availed but little.

And now Olav Audunsson remembered them so vividly—the two old men who used to appear at the door of the closet. When the madman had had a fit and struggled till he was faint and calm again, his father led him outside to sun him if the weather suited.

First the great-grandfather entered—a giant in stature, with long thick hair and a beard that fell over his chest; there was still as much black as white in it. He helped his son out, putting an arm about his neck and bending him, lest he should strike his face against the frame of the door. The madman had not the wit to turn aside from anything, but went straight on.

Torgils Foulbeard seemed a small man, for he was shrunken and bent. His whole head was overgrown with hair; the beard reached up to the eyes. All this tangle of his was matted with filth, grey and yellow of every dirty shade; from the midst of it shone the great eyes, pale greyish-green like sea-water, bloodshot in the whites, with an uncanny stare, and the nose small, straight and finely shaped, but red; it had been frostbitten one winter night when he had slipped out unknown to his father. But when old Olav had taken his son to the bath-house, cleansed him with lye and sand, and combed his hair, the whole shaggy head of Torgils shone silvery white and soft as a great tuft of bog-cotton. Torgils looked much older than his father.

Old Olav fed him as though he had been a child. Sometimes he had to shake and beat Torgils to make him open his mouth; at other times the trouble was that he would not shut it again, but let the food run out upon his beard. His father could get him to take meat and solid food by stuffing mouthfuls between Torgils’s teeth and then thrusting his face close to his son’s and chewing with empty jaws, up and down with all his force—then it might be that the madman mimicked him and chewed too.