The factory is going to be taken into use again and set going. There is a swarm of craftsmen and ordinary workmen out there; the rusty old machinery is being dismantled and new put in its place. Consideration is being given to whether the old steam-driven machinery should be taken out to sea and sunk or taken out of the country and sold as scrap iron, but for the moment it is being put on a kind of huge sledge drawn by black horses and taken down to the shore near the Ring so as to get it out of the way.
Here, it is stood up on end and looks very strange and alien in the middle of the everyday surroundings of the grey, lichen-covered rocks. There is a “manhole” down at the bottom in the big steam boiler, so that you can get into it. It isn’t quite dark in there, as a cold, iron light seeps in from above, creating a kind of nightmare half-light, threatening yet strangely compelling.
So the big drum is here and is no longer a boiler but something else, something without name or significance – like something in a dream. Something that might remind you of the Tower at the End of the World, which of course is far bigger and more impressive. Or was, for it is not there any more.
No, the Tower at the End of the World is irrevocably a thing of the past – indeed, it has never even really existed! A strange, shattering, vertiginous idea both filled with a sense of release and yet full of melancholy. And so there you stand now, abandoned and numbed, in the dark interior of the old, discarded boiler… and outside the mists swirl above the rushing abyss where the spirit of God still hovers over the waters (for after all, no one can stop Him from doing this). It is sinister and lonely out here, indeed you could scream with revulsion, but yet you wait a little longer before escaping into the day and reality… you wait until you simply can’t stand it any longer; you double up and stand there suffering until you almost die from fright. Then, with a howl of liberation, you climb out of the manhole and stand there in the light of day, thrilled with relief and delight, like a soul that has escaped from the powers of darkness and battled its way up from the tomb…
Just fancy that you are standing out there in the sunlight beneath a blue sky listening to the gulls screeching and seeing their wings flash in the air and casting fleeting shadows on the rocky surface. And on the drying grounds over on the other side of the Ring, the fisherfolk are busy lifting the heavy canvases and bast mats from the stacks, for now it is lovely dry weather so they must hurry to get the fish spread out in the sunshine. And Anton, the watchman stands with his telescope, looking out across the bay, where a heavily laden fishing sloop is on its way in.
But that game of terror in the tower is one you’ll have to play once more before you go back to town. Once more, you have to squeeze into the iron night in there and suffer until you can’t stand it any longer, and then laughing and gasping with delight, you dash back out into the sunshine and freedom.
***
When you think about it, it’s probably a silly game and perhaps you are what you least of all want to be: a feckless idiot.
It’s quite a different matter with Little Brother; no one would think of calling him feckless – he’s a “bright lad”; he already knows his tables up to the ten times off by heart, and Father’s starting to teach him up to twenty as well. As for you, you still find it difficult to remember them up to ten times – not to mention the Reigns of the Kings and Queens. And you can sense that your Father is afraid you might become a feckless idiot and good-for-nothing like Uncle Hans. For when he takes the time to sit down once more to tell you what the world is made of, you just sit there staring at his pipe and his big nose, and that feckless head of yours fails to make any sense of it at all.
For if the world is round and there are people living all the way round it, why do you never hear of anyone falling off?
“Because ‘up and down’ is something that only applies here and now. Out in Space there’s no ‘up and down’, only out from and in towards.”
And then we come to all these questions about the Moon and the Sun, the Tide and Currents. And Newton’s apple.
Why an apple and not a pear? And why was it an apple and not a pear that Eve plucked from the Tree of Knowledge and gave Adam to eat?
Mother nods over her ironing and says she knows what you are getting at.
And then your thoughts wander from Newton’s perfect apple to the egg that Columbus made to stand up by knocking the pointed end down on the table top. Surely that was a bit of a cheat?
Yes, Mother agrees. Like the story of Alexander the Great’s knot.
“What knot was that?”
Then Mother tells the story of the Gordian knot that Alexander undid by slicing it with his sword. That was cheating as well.
And all that about the Earth rolling and sailing freely in the air – that’s not far from cheating, either. ’Cos where is God’s Heaven then, and where is God Himself?
Here, it is Father who can’t really follow, but is content to sit with a frown on his face and at a loss for an answer.
Then he gets up with a brief laugh and stands with his hands in his trouser pockets, looking out of the window.
***
But the fact is that there are both bright sparks and feckless idiots. Bright sparks use their heads and decide what is to happen and how to deal with everything. They have a lot to take care of and worry about.
Feckless idiots, on the other hand – they don’t bother about anything even though they get in the way both of themselves and of others and mess things up for themselves. They sing and hum and play the horn or sit rubbing their violins or feeding their ducks and sticking coloured paper on blown duck eggs.
Or they lie around dreaming and crying out in their sleep and then coming and telling hair-raising stories about what they have experienced in their dreams and wondering what this, that and the other can mean and “foreshadow”.
Selimsen, the artist, writes his dreams down in a “night book” and keeps a count of which dreams come true and which don’t.
That’s ridiculous and disgraceful. Father and Michelsen the bookkeeper are agreed on that. And so, too, are the Numerator and the Denominator, as they call the twin brothers who come and play cards with Father and Michelsen. They are both navigation instructors and among the brightest sparks in town; they sit there with shiny foreheads and raised eyebrows and smile in their beards at all the wickedness of the world.
But they don’t believe in God.
“And what will happen to the Numerator and Denominator on Judgement Day?”
Mother sighs and looks into space.
“Don’t ask me, my dear, for I simply don’t know. I only know that to God the Numerator and the Denominator are no more than two grains of sand on the seashore.”