Willem Hermans - Beyond Sleep

We’ll never get there at this rate. It’ll take us a day and a night just to cover the first twenty-five kilometres.

I notice that Qvigstad, Arne, Mikkelsen and the strong man are now gradually getting ahead. I force my legs to go faster. I was panting before, now I am gasping. I push up the head-net to get more air, and with my next intake of breath a mosquito flies into my mouth. I can feel it at the back of my throat, on my epiglottis … I cough, splutter, try frantically to muster some saliva, gulp.

I have swallowed it.

As a famished prisoner prizes every potato, even a sliver of potato peel, for the nutrition it contains, so I now perceive distance as a precious commodity, gradually coming into my possession with each step I take.

Each step shortens the twenty-five kilometres stretching ahead. Each step is one in the right direction. My mouth and throat are paper-dry from all my panting.

Much as my head feels it is about to explode, much as I have to strain every muscle to keep my balance despite the load on my back, I am making headway. We all are. It will be some time before we reach our limits.

To think that people shunted megaliths weighing up to five tonnes over the moors, simply to build burial chambers! How they managed without horses, winches, wheels is a mystery. But it may have taken several generations to assemble twenty or thirty boulders in one place. Building cathedrals was to the Middle Ages what shunting megaliths was to the Stone Age. Levering them forward with the aid of tree trunks, half a metre a day. Which is one hundred and fifty metres a year. One point five kilometres in a decade. How many boulders of a size they considered large enough would there have been lying around the countryside? How big was the radius within which they collected them? Ten kilometres? Twenty? Surely not more. It was a feasible, if lengthy, process. Anything is feasible, provided people aren’t in a hurry, provided they have faith in their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and don’t doubt the necessity of the task at hand — such as building barrows for the dead.

Cathedrals took even longer to build, and they were just as useless. Barrows are the Stone Age version of cathedrals. What is my cathedral? I am bulding a cathedral of unknown proportions, and by the time it is finished I will be long dead and no-one will ever know of my contribution.

The slope becomes less soggy as we climb. It also becomes less steep, and after a while there is no gradient at all.

We unload our rucksacks onto some big rocks. We have been hard at it for twenty minutes. Qvigstad strolls around, swinging a colossal hammer with a handle half a metre long. He steps up to a sugar-white rock and knocks off a corner.

‘I’ve chipped one of Mother Earth’s teeth!’ he roars.

Arne opens his battered camera case and takes out his old Leica. Handling it as if it were a piece of antique porcelain, he raises it to eye level. The camera itself is battered, too, with glints of brass showing through cracks in the black enamel.

Arne presses the shutter, then says, with a rueful shake of the head:

‘Perhaps …’

From here it looks as if the Vaddasgaissa range begins just over the next hill, but according to the map we have at least another fifteen kilometres to go.

The celluloid window in my map pocket is too scratched to be of any use in this light. The transparency of these windows never lasts beyond the first trip. I pull out the map and study the route with my magnifying glass.

I try to count how many rivers we have yet to cross. There seem to be ten of them, all big. Small ones are not marked on the map. Nor are the rises and falls indicated in any detail: variations of less than thirty metres are ignored. Which is to be expected. One centimetre on the map represents one kilometre in reality.

As I fold away my map, I see Mikkelsen offering Qvigstad a drink of water. Qvigstad takes a swig and passes the bottle to Arne. Arne drinks and passes it to me. My mouth and throat feel like pumice as I gulp the water down. We dig little graves for our cigarettes with our heels, then hoist our rucksacks. We are off again, downhill this time.

Going downhill brings fears about my knees giving way, but they are proving remarkably trustworthy. The complexity of the human knee! With each step the combined weight of torso, rucksack and thighs slams on the bundle of slithery ligaments and cartilage at the head of the tibia known as the knee joint. No tearing, no dislocation. Imagine if a grain of sand got in! Even the tiniest particle would cause havoc. Where did I hear about rock-hard crystals of ureum forming in the joints of people with arthritis, or was it rheumatism? Oh, Father, what agony! This pain is so excruciating that it attacks the very organ we use to overcome it!

Going downhill means gearing the entire body to shock absorption. The resilience of the meniscal cartilage. The strength of the tendons: beyond belief if you know how easy it is to bend a wire until it breaks. What a piece of work is man! But what an ordeal to put your own piece of work to this test!

If you tip your chair back often enough the legs will break. I even managed to break a metal chair that way once.

Isn’t the sheer, incomprehensible toughness of the human body enough to make you despair of this torture ever coming to an end?

Downhill. Responding willingly to the pull of gravity, but it’s hardly a question of willing, because I can’t stop.

The carpet of moss thickens, then come the dwarf beeches with their dark green leathery leaves, and later still the polar willows with their asses’ ears of pale green felt. The branches set about untying my shoelaces.

A stretch of spongy peat, which I sink into. Better to step on stones, but they are all round. Pools of black water, with nothing growing in it. Bigger and bigger pools, with black earth in between.

The river. Shallow. Hardly any current. Mikkelsen, Qvigstad and Arne stop to scoop water into their plastic cups. I haven’t got my cup to hand. Should I take off the rucksack to hunt for it? My mouth is so parched that I can’t shut it any more — what, already? Arne turns round and passes me his plastic cup.

I go up on my toes where the water is less shallow, but by the time I reach the far side both my feet are wet and cold.

Far side … pools, marshes. More of those grass-covered hummocks with a core of ice which are known by the Icelandic name of thufur . More polar willows, then a stretch of dwarf beeches petering out into just moss and stones. The slope steepens. Insects patter on my canvas hat like hailstones. The low sun sets alight the clouds of mosquitoes circling the heads of my four companions.

We have done fifteen minutes of climbing. How much more of this slope is there? How steep is it? Steep enough for it to be impossible for me to stand up straight without the weight of my rucksack pulling me over backwards.

I plod on, putting one foot ahead of the other. Each step counts. A miracle, wouldn’t you say? One step. Just one step and the distance to the top is less than it was before. Step, step, merely lifting the foot and bringing it down slightly further on. Couldn’t be simpler. Hardly more strenuous than standing still, what with the heavy load on my back. Step. Between the stones there is moss. Also bare ground. Sand and pale grit, an occasional bleached bone or vertebra. No sign of anyone having been here before. But then we too have been covering our tracks.

My watch tells me it’s nine thirty-five. We’ve been going for nearly an hour. An hour already! And I can easily keep it up for another hour, two hours, three, as long as I like. It’s bad, but it’s not getting worse. Where’s my headache? Gone, since I haven’t given it a thought.