Margit Sandemo - The Ice People 35 - The Flute

The guide stopped again. “We know this branch up to this point,” he said in a low voice. “I did go farther in with someone else, but ... we turned back.”

“Was it blocked?”

“Not in terms of walking.”

He didn’t say any more. Not about that. But he did add: “They say that others went there. Approximately twenty-five years ago. They, too, had to turn back.”

“For the same reason?”

“I can’t imagine any other. They subsequently died, so there was never an opportunity to ask them.”

The youngest of the three men said boldly: “But we’re going on, aren’t we?”

“Of course,” said the others with confidence.

The guide was silent.

As it turned out, they had a very hard time forcing their way over the next heap of stalagmites, that is, the stone columns growing up from the floor. At times the space was so narrow that they had to elbow their way through, and in one place there were marks left by someone who had attempted to chip away some of the rock wall in order to create a passage.

“That was probably one of those who came here before,” the guide muttered.

One of the lanterns went out, and it was impossible to bring it back to life again. The owner practically felt abandoned.

They continued to fumble their way along the passage, and it felt as though they had been scratching and scraping their hips and knees for a thousand years. Then they stopped.

“What is it?” one of them asked incredulously.

“I can sense that it is still here,” said the guide.

They all sniffed the air.

“Good Lord!” another one murmured.

“Although it’s faint, it’s a horrible stench!” a third one said.

“Let’s go on.”

They continued, somewhat more cautiously than before.

The stench grew stronger. Finally, one of them stopped.

“I ... I can’t stand it anymore. I’m about to be sick!”

Everyone was coughing.

“Did you get this far last time with the others?” someone asked the guide.

“No, not nearly so far.”

“What could it be?”

They sniffed the nauseating smell in an attempt to determine what it was.

“I’ve never experienced anything like it,” one of the men muttered. “There is something frighteningly ancient permeating the rock. A chemical combination!”

“It’s not a dead animal, even though the stench is rotten.”

The guide, who was a simple yet civilized man, said in a subdued voice: “I know it sounds stupid, but I think it smells ... evil somehow. Malicious, that is.”

He laughed a little to take the sting out of his words, but the others didn’t laugh with him.

“I would say the same thing myself,” said one of them.

“Had it not been for the fact that the era of the dragons is over,” said the youngest, “you would have thought we had entered the dragon’s very den.”

”Let’s turn back,” one of the others suggested.

“Just a few more steps,” a third pleaded.

“Not me,” the guide said. “You’ll have to go on your own, then.”

They discussed it for a moment. The youngest one took a few steps and shone his lamp on the way before him.

“We won’t get any farther,” he said flatly.

They turned to see what he was looking at.

In the glow from his lantern they could see the shaft opening at his feet, only to disappear in pitch darkness.

And that was where the stench was coming from. Later, when they were out in the fresh air, they could have sworn that they had seen dust-like steam rising from the abyss.

They never went there again. And no one else did, either. Because the guide blocked up the entrance at the place where they had lowered themselves down with a rope. “Already searched. Danger of death. No value,” he wrote on the sign he had put up.

And the strange thing was that none of them felt like telling anyone else about their experience down there.

In truth, they never had a chance to. One contracted a fearful disease with boils and failing lymph nodes. He died after a very short time. Another developed a tendency to get dizzy and lost his balance while climbing in a cave, plummeting to his death. The third had been so badly affected by the stench – the swamp gas, as he called it – that his lungs were ruined. The same thing happened to the guide.

In other words, no witnesses were left.

The new century had brought many changes with it on every level. Mostly in good ways, but there were also many good things that had disappeared. Verner von Heidenstam’s poem “Sweden” contains the line: “Now bells are ringing where armies used to glitter.”

Alas! It was a long time since sleigh bells had jingled in Sweden’s forests and mountains!

Everything went so fast, the changes came so suddenly, that people, especially the elderly, had difficulty keeping up with them.

In all areas of cultural life, many changes took place in an explosive way.

And in the field of music, all ideas were turned upside down.

Concepts such as polytonal elements, chromatic scales and atonal expressionism emerged. In 1909, Arnold Schoenberg composed “Three piano pieces”, opus 11, and with this work he started a veritable revolution in music. Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring created havoc at its premiere in Paris. The raw, heathen tones and the varying rhythms were too much for the gala-dressed audience, and several got up and left the hall.

But the new music had come to stay. Many followed in these ground-breaking footsteps – great composers as well as minor, poor ones.

Great experiments were made with different keys, the twelve-tone scale, and gliding, mysterious sounds.

For the Ice People it was catastrophic.

But they didn’t realize it. They didn’t really concern themselves with music and seldom went to a concert.

They knew nothing of the dreadful things that were taking place.

Not until the headstrong young Vetle was paid a visit one night.

But much had happened before then.

At the place where a great Spanish river flows into the sea, an enormous delta has been created, an area of marshland so boundlessly big that you can’t see from one end to the other.

Out of that swampy area, outcrops of rock emerge here and there. Tall, grassy mounds or barren cliffs.

On the summit of one of these crags a castle clung. It was surrounded by an area of a dying forest so swampy that there were only small islands of firm ground in a sea of mud. The forest is gone now, the castle is nothing but barely visible ruins, and the marshland has been drained. But in 1914 it was all still there.

The castle clearly showed the influence of the Moorish period in Spain. But its exterior was now dilapidated, and some of its stones had fallen down into the bog. Inside, however, everything was just as refined as before, with a staff of servants to tend to the extremely eccentric lord of the castle and his family.

It wasn’t too far from the castle to the city of Seville, and the lord, who was musically gifted himself, would often visit the concert halls there.

This man played the flute. He also dabbled in composing pieces of his own, which he shouldn’t have done because he was completely hopeless at it. But he was tremendously interested in the new musical styles of the age and absorbed them all wholesale. He would experiment for hours on end with chromatic scales on his flute, and he used up huge amounts of music paper and never threw anything away. Because everything he wrote was, of course, extremely precious!

Once in a while he actually managed to produce something worth playing. But most of it was mere rubbish: incomplete phrases without style or value.

The marsh that surrounded the castle was rather frightening. Travellers needed to be very familiar with it before venturing across it. A single track led through the swampy terrain to the hill on which the castle stood, and at the beginning of the road there was a gatekeeper’s lodge housing big, aggressive dogs. So the castle was well protected, which suited the lord, Don Miguel, very well. He was, as mentioned, very eccentric: he believed himself to be virtually without peer in the world, the envy of others who wished to see him dead. His loyal servants were carefully selected, trigger-happy and not particularly scrupulous.