The Rider on the White Horse | Page 5

had brought home a handful of clay; then he sat down

beside the old man, who now humoured him, and by the light of the
thin tallow candle he kneaded all sorts of dike models, laid them in a
flat dish with water and tried to imitate the washing away by the waves;
or he took his slate and drew the profiles of the dikes toward the
waterside as he thought they ought to be.
He had no idea of keeping up intercourse with his schoolmates; it
seemed, too, as if they did not care for this dreamer. When winter had
come again and the frost had appeared, he wandered still farther out on
the dike to points he had never reached before, until the boundless
ice-covered sand flats lay before him.
During the continuous frost in February, dead bodies were found
washed ashore; they had lain on the frozen sand flats by the open sea. A
young woman who had been present when they had taken the bodies
into the village, stood talking fluently with old Haien.
"Don't you believe that they looked like people!" she cried; "no, like
sea devils! Heads as big as this," and she touched together the tips of
her outspread and outstretched hands, "coal-black and shiny, like newly
baked bread! And the crabs had nibbled them, and the children
screamed when they saw them." For old Haien this was nothing new.
"I suppose they have floated in the water since November!" he said
indifferently.
Hauke stood by in silence, but as soon as he could, he sneaked out on
the dike; nobody knew whether he wanted to look for more dead, or if
he was drawn to the places now deserted by the horror that still clung to
them. He ran on and on, until he stood alone in the solitary waste,
where only the winds blew over the dike where there was nothing but
the wailing voices of the great birds that shot by swiftly. To his left was
the wide empty marshland, on the other side the endless beach with its
sand flats now glistening with ice; it seemed as if the whole world lay
in a white death.
Hauke remained standing on the dike, and his sharp eyes gazed far
away. There was no sign of the dead; but when the invisible streams on

the sand flats found their way beneath the ice, it rose and sank in
streamlike lines.
He ran home, but on one of the next nights he was out there again. In
places the ice had now split; smoke-clouds seemed to rise out of the
cracks, and over the whole sand-stretch a net of steam and mist seemed
to be spun, which at evening mingled strangely with the twilight.
Hauke stared at it with fixed eyes, for in the mist dark figures were
walking up and down that seemed to him as big as human beings. Far
off he saw them promenade back and forth by the steaming fissures,
dignified, but with strange, frightening gestures, with long necks and
noses. All at once, they began to jump up and down like fools,
uncannily, the big ones over the little ones, the little ones over the big
ones--then they spread out and lost all shape.
"What do they want? Are they ghosts of the drowned?" thought Hauke.
"Hallo!" he screamed out aloud into the night; but they did not heed his
cry and kept on with their strange antics.
Then the terrible Norwegian sea spectres came to his mind, that an old
captain had once told him about, who bore stubby bunches of sea grass
on their necks instead of heads. He did not run away, however, but dug
the heels of his boots faster into the clay of the dike and rigidly
watched the farcical riot that was kept up before his eyes in the falling
dusk. "Are you here in our parts too?" he said in a hard voice. "You
shall not chase me away!"
Not until darkness covered all things did he walk home with stiff, slow
steps. But behind him he seemed to hear the rustling of wings and
resounding screams. He did not look round, neither did he walk faster,
and it was late when he came home. Yet he is said to have told neither
his father nor anyone else about it. But many years after he took his
feeble-minded little girl, with whom the Lord later had burdened him,
out on the dike with him at the same time of day and year, and the same
riot is said to have appeared then out on the sand flats. But he told her
not to be afraid, that these things were only the herons and crows, that
seemed so big and horrible, and that