To-day the ship’s captain hoisted the sails for the voyage home. With him embarked also Matthias Jochumsen and his brother Just, there being nothing in this land for them to do.
FROM HANS EGEDE’S JOURNAL, JUNE 1733
The moon is in the way of the sun. A three-quarter eclipse sends a shaft of darkness sweeping over the land. At two in the afternoon it is evening, and morning again within the hour.
Egede observes the phenomenon with his telescope. He has smeared soot on the lens. Now he sees the moon glide like a sickle over the platter of the sun, and together they form a single copper-red disc. A blood moon. Is it an omen? He makes a note in his journal, his hand trembling slightly. It is but a simple phenomenon of nature, he tells himself. It is included in the almanac. Nothing to tremble about. And yet he trembles. He can hardly hold a knife, much less the quill he uses to note down his observations. But this is how it has been for some months now.
His apprehension is by no means assuaged when a native woman, one of the baptized, comes to him the next day and speaks babblingly of an ill omen. Naturally, this has been brought on by the same eclipse, but the coincidence merely increases his anxiety. I dreamt about my sister’s son Carl, she says. The one who went with your ship to Denmark. He came back to kill all the people in this country.
Do not go about with such talk, Egede tells her, ill at ease. Events of the future do not make themselves known to people in the form of dreams. That is superstition.
Will you say the Lord’s Prayer for us? the woman asks.
He prays with her, and blesses her. When she is gone, he feels relieved. Yet he is more burdened by anxiety and fear than ever before. Something is wrong. I can feel it. Is God punishing me? No, it is only the usual restlessness of spring.
The good ship the Caritas – ‘charity’ – arrives only a week later, carrying with her a cargo of building materials, greetings from King Christian and his gracious undertaking to support the colony with two thousand rigsdaler per annum. With her also are three German lay brothers, Moravian missionaries dispatched by the Count von Zinzendorf. It is the King who has been infected by this pietistic fervour. Egede understands it is largely for this reason that the colony has been allowed to continue. Rightly, then, he should be glad of these new foreigners. Moreover, a Greenlandic boy, Carl, has arrived too.
It seems the new king has taken up the baton and wishes to carry the Greenlandic design further. All is well. But is he happy on that account? No, he is not. Or perhaps in principle he is. In practice, however, in the depths of his innermost Lutheran soul, he is a storm of opposing emotions, among them anxiety and guilt. He hears the sound of jangling chains. He hears the pillory slam shut about his neck and wrists. He hears the crunch of his cervical vertebrae as the rope halts his body’s fall. I am a criminal, he thinks. I am condemned. God’s wrath is consuming me.
The boy Carl is the only survivor of the Greenlandic children who went with the Morian in ’31. A girl died only a few days ago on board the ship. The crew say her illness proceeded with astonishing speed. She began to bleed from her eyes and nose, swelled up and lost consciousness, then lay gasping for some few hours before passing away, all in the space of a single day and night. Scurvy, Egede thinks to himself. Consumption, cold. They are so frail, these natives. They cannot withstand the voyage to Denmark. And when first they are there they cannot withstand coming back.
He asks Kieding, who mumbles something about the pox.
What indications are there for the pox? he wants to know.
The acute course of the illness, the bleedings, the physician says with a sigh.
And what speaks against it?
That no others are ill. The pox never occurs on its own. It is an epidemic disease.
If it is the pox, what would be the consequences?
Disastrous, says Kieding, and smiles into his long and tangled beard.
Fortunately the boy Carl seems to be well enough. In fact he is in the highest of spirits, parading about in his new Danish clothes, speaking like a lord and pretending to have forgotten his own mother tongue, apart from when he is boasting to the natives of everything he has seen. Houses as tall as cliffs, he says in a strident voice, painting a picture with sweeping gestures. Halls illuminated by lamps in their thousands. Rooms with holes down which to shit, and servants at the ready to wipe your arse with tissue paper. Crowds of people like great shoals of fish. Jets of water spouting from the ground with golden apples balanced on top. Women who lie with you for money. No one believes him, or else they choose not to. They find him annoying, he is too full of himself, and moreover neither fish nor fowl, neither Dane nor Greenlander, a native boy who has lost his mind. They are ashamed of him, and laugh at him behind his back. The Danes poke fun at him. They ply him with drink and place a paper hat on his head. You can be our new Two-Kings, they say. Long live King Carl! He cannot grasp that they are making fun of him. He believes he is the King of Greenland. He bosses his siblings and his mother, the only ones who will put up with him. He is unreasonable towards them, and shouts and screams. Eventually they throw him out. He reels about in the colony at night with his paper crown on his head, singing sea shanties and hymns, until the fire-watch takes him by the collar, bundles him into the blubber house and bolts the door.
Natives come streaming to the colony from the entire district. Others, who have seen the ship on its way north, come from the south. All wish to trade. Their boats are laden with fox-skins, bear-skins, blubber and the fine, spiralling narwhal tusks which they know find favour with well-to-do Europeans who think they stem from some fabled creature with a horn projecting from its forehead. Egede and the traders of course know where these tusks are from, but somewhere on the route between Greenland and Denmark the simple narwhal became the mythical unicorn, which has proved to be very good business indeed, for any Greenland trader worth his salt knows that he is dealing in dreams more than prosaic goods.
The natives also come to listen to Egede tell his stories about Jesus. It seems that word of the good Christian message has spread. He has himself made trips to the south, and also some way north, but these were tours of inspection, not missionary work. In the main he has kept himself to the surrounding fjord systems of Godthåb, inhabited by perhaps two thousand natives. He has harboured no wish to spread, and thereby dilute, the message, but rather to concentrate it upon a small flock of genuinely believing natives who might then, little by little, pass on their faith to others in more outlying areas. Such a process cannot be hastened. It has been his conviction and his method in all the years he has been in the land. But now he discovers he has more than enough to do preaching for natives who seem to him to be sincere in their interest in what he has to say. He finds this odd. Where does this interest come from all of a sudden? He is mystified by it, though also happy for the diversion it brings from his darker thoughts.
The colony is filled with drunken Danes fornicating with native women, and with each other, vandalizing the buildings and spreading their muck and obscenity. The shore is packed with native tents, and still they keep coming. Smoke and the smells of cooking meat rise up all around. The permanent colony crew, normally so well behaved, are whirled into the general mood of abandon and the officers are compelled to introduce the harshest military discipline. Floggings and other forms of corporal punishment are a daily occurrence. People lie about outside, sleeping it off. The blubber house has been turned into a house of detention and is crammed with inmates. It reminds him of the summer of 1728 when the colony was first established and the place was milling with seamen and military. Unlike then, however, the weather is good this year. The earth is like a slowly turning disc, gently oscillating, the sun circling in waves above the horizon.
It is strange how the weather affects him. Always he longs for good weather, sunshine, a gentle air, stillness, all that was missing in Lofoten and now here in Greenland. But when for once the weather is good, he is miserable. Then he will yearn for fog, wind, the pouring rain and cold. There is peace in poor weather. It provides room for spiritual absorption, for prayer and studies of the Scriptures, for writing and contemplation. The summer now allows neither reading nor writing. It is hustle and bustle, and shallowness. Yet beneath this buzzing activity dwells his great and all-consuming pain. He feels alone and abandoned.
But it is good for him to be busy. The summer months are always hectic, but this year they are livelier than ever. His gloomiest thoughts are kept at bay. He writes a large number of letters, to the Missionskollegium, to the Chancellery, to the King in person, to his family in Norway; he sends lists and reports, an appraisal of the state of the colony buildings, and draws up a trade forecast for the year to come, less optimistically, more realistically, and perhaps more resignedly than in previous years. At the same time he is of course the priest, the only source of spiritual guidance for natives and Danes alike now that the two young clergymen have returned home. He attends the sick and dying, he comforts, admonishes and punishes, he listens to confessions which cloud his soul and heighten his sense of guilt. But who is to comfort the one who comforts? Where is a priest to go with his guilt? To God, of course. Yet he feels the need for an intermediary, for he has fallen into doubt as to whether God wishes him well.
The boy Carl comes to him. He is rather the worse for wear, having been drunk for several weeks. Now he wishes to repent. He weeps and begs forgiveness for his sins. Egede grants him absolution. They kneel and pray together.
I am ill, says Carl. He holds out his hands. They are red and skinless.
This is the scabies, Egede tells him. Stay away from the bottle and from the Danish crew, and doubtless it will heal of its own accord.
He cannot help but see something of Frederik Christian in the boy. The same bastardly division between Danish and Greenlandic. The same corrupted mildness. The same useless intelligence. Like a mark on the forehead. He will die, he thinks. Of course he will die. And it is we who will kill him.
The three Germans of the Moravian brethren are a headache to him. His spoken German is not good, though he writes the language reasonably well and reads it without issue. The men are Christian David, a yellow-toothed carpenter in his early forties with a flat, pentagonal face, and two younger wool-spinners, doleful-looking cousins, Matthäus and Christian Stach. All three have something of the craftsman’s solidity about them and seem perpetually to be aglow in their faith. Lay preachers. Egede despises them from day one, particularly their leader, David, who combines arrogance with ignorance, and self-assurance with utter helplessness in practical matters.
David delivers to him a letter from King Christian in which the King asks him to receive the three lay brethren well and to help them settle in every way possible.
He has invited them into his home. Gertrud and the girls serve them a meal. They converse. Gertrud turns out to be far more proficient in German than he is. It surprises him. No matter how long he has known her, she continues to reveal new aspects of herself, he thinks. It would not surprise him in the least if suddenly she broke into fluent Hebrew. Several times he must ask her to translate a word or expression, and in each instance she does so effortlessly. Casually he mentions Luther. No reaction. How is it now with these pietists, he asks himself, do they even acknowledge the Reformation? He has not investigated the matter and is unwilling to show his ignorance by asking stupid questions. So to begin with they merely chat about one thing and another. He talks about the difficulties a missionary encounters here, about his constant battles with wily natives, with the shamans, with the beliefs of old, the customs and habits which all accord so poorly with a Christian life. And during their whole conversation he receives the same refrain in reply: the Lord Jesus Christ will help us.
I hope then that I may be His valuable instrument, he says.
They reply more vaguely than unreservedly and accommodatingly. Insolent prigs, he thinks.
How many years has Mr Egede been in the country? David asks.
Twelve years this summer.
And how many followers has Mr Egede assembled in those many years? David’s tone is sarcastic. He knows full well the nature of his baptismal practice.
I have been reticent with the holy sacrament of the baptism, he replies, brushing some fluff from his sleeve. However, this past year or two I have baptized more children than before. He looks up and sees David’s smirking flat face. He breathes deeply and endeavours to explain himself. To baptize heathens indiscriminately would be hazardous indeed. Many would simply fall back into their ignorant ways as soon as they left the colony.
We Moravian brethren practise mass baptism, as John the Baptist did himself.
He did? Egede intervenes, but David continues unperturbed.
We place our trust in Jesus Christ. Once a person is baptized, he or she is with the Saviour.
Yes, exactly, that’s my point, Egede says, and wishes to go on, only to be interrupted again.
We are not miserly with the baptism. Baptism is a gift to mankind, not something to be kept and hoarded. Baptism is not a stash of money with which to line one’s coffin. It does not diminish by being spent. On the contrary, the more who receive salvation, the more there becomes of it.
Baptism is a serious matter, Egede interjects. It is lifelong devotion to the Lord, and requires thorough preparation.
David laughs impertinently, and the two Stach cousins snigger an echo.
Baptism is not a game for the masses, Egede insists.
To us, baptism is a celebration, says the German in a schoolmasterly tone, the two cousins nodding their agreement, faces frowned in abrupt earnestness. The more who take part, the better.
What about the Augsburg Confession? Egede ventures. Do you refer to it?
We adhere only to Jesus Christ and His love.
He senses they are moving in circles and changes tack: What will you live on here? Have you brought materials with you to build a house?
We will cultivate the soil and build with the land’s own timber. We shall not come begging to the colony.
The land is very difficult to cultivate. We have conducted trials with beet inside the fjord, though with meagre results. Out here by the sea the climate is too harsh and cold.
Then we will live on fish and wild herbs.
And as for timber, Egede goes on, there is no woodland here to provide building materials.
Then we will dig holes in the ground and live there. David’s stoicism is as heroic as it is stupid. And in Egede’s experience, stupidity is as impenetrable as granite.
Well, I wish you luck, he says in a tone meant to be foreboding, but which comes across as prickly instead. But now I must return to my work.
The Germans take their leave. He hears David in the passage whisper theatrically to his acolytes: Is there anything more repugnant than an unreformed Lutheran?
Yes, he thinks. Yes, there is.
The Caritas departs. The colony is quiet again. He makes some visitations and a couple of small reconnaissance trips. Nothing is the same as in the old days, those first pioneering times when every day was an expedition and he travelled the land with the certain feeling that the Lord’s hand was guiding and blessing him. Now it is a miserable chore. Still, it feels good to be away from the colony and all it reminds him of. He takes Niels with him. They sail together, sleeping in the same tent, or, if the weather allows, beneath the open sky. He endeavours to get to know his son, but finds it far from easy. Niels humours him to make their conversations as brief as possible. An exchange might proceed as follows.
Egede: How splendid to be out and about.
Niels: Indeed.
Egede: And I sense the savages are warming to our message.
Niels: Yes, I think perhaps they are.
Egede: I think their sorcerers are losing their grip on them.
Niels: Yes, I’m sure.
Egede: Take this Apralutork. (He intentionally mispronounces the name so that his son might correct him, but Niels pays no heed to the error.) Have you seen anything of him recently?
Niels: No, he hasn’t shown himself for some time.
Egede: He’s hiding out. He knows he has lost, I shouldn’t wonder.
Niels: Yes, I shouldn’t wonder.
Egede: And you, are you content with your work in the Trade?
Niels: Yes, I am. Thank you.
Egede: I was thinking that when we return home in a year or two you might take a formal apprenticeship with a merchant. What would you say to that?
Niels: I think it sounds good, Father. I’d like that.
Egede: It would only be natural if in some way you remained with the Greenland trade. Or have you other plans?
Niels: No. That sounds fine, Father.
Egede: It pleases me very much to think that one of my sons is a priest and the other a merchant. No more is needed to push our civilization on.
Niels: Yes. No. That’s right, I’m sure.
Egede: Anyway. Goodnight, my boy.
Niels: Goodnight, Father.
He wishes the lad would oppose him more, perhaps even contradict him. Previously they would quarrel until they spat with rage. No one could make him angrier than Niels. Well, perhaps Gertrud could. But they are two of a kind. Often he would end up boxing the boy’s ears in sheer fury and frustration. And always it helped. The mood would about-face immediately and Niels would be good-heartedness itself. Or at least sometimes he would. Now he is a young man. His cheeks are rough with stubble and he smells like a man too, as Egede has ample opportunity to note when they are off on their trips together.
Lying sleepless in the muggy tent with Niels snoring and farting beside him, he thinks, as he has done so many times before, of Abraham and Isaac. God’s command to Abraham, that he offer up his son, may certainly seem unreasonable. What kind of a God would demand such a thing? But in fact God is merely demonstrating to him what is necessary and unavoidable. All fathers must give up their sons, in the sense that they must let them go so that they may discover their own ways. They must let them go out into the world, the perilous world, let them make their own mistakes and bring their lives into jeopardy. We might just as well be told to put a knife to their throats. For that is what we do, we fathers.
For Gertrud, as for all mothers, it is a different matter. They can have the children with them and at the same time let them be free. He has no idea how they manage it. It must be to do with the motherly feeling and attachment. It is God who has made us as such. The man must kill his sons, metaphorically speaking, while the mother is allowed to remain a loving anchorage point throughout the boy’s life. Abraham and Sarah. It is a harsh acknowledgement. For who can a man feel attached to if not his sons? No one.
Frederik Christian in the mission room that night, kneeling, weeping in his drunkenness, and what did I do? I sent him away. Unforgivable.
He recalls a conversation:
Egede: When I leave, you shall carry on my work.
Frederik Christian: I’d rather go with you to Denmark.
Egede: What will you do in Denmark, my boy?
Frederik Christian: I could prepare for the priesthood. Is it not possible for a Greenlander?
Egede: Yes, I suppose it is, though it has never happened before. First you would have to go to Latin school, then graduate from the university. The question is what the professors would say about it. I don’t know. It would take a long time at any rate.
Frederik Christian: That doesn’t matter.
Egede: Is it what you want, my boy?
Frederik Christian: I think so.
Egede: We shall talk about it when the time comes. But you must not make the passage on your own. Look what happens to the natives who go to Denmark. It destroys them, even if they survive.
Frederik Christian: It would not be like that for me. If I could study for the priesthood everything would be all right. I would make a good priest, I’m sure of it. I have been well taught.
Egede (chuckling): You little rascal. You know how to ingratiate yourself.
And thus their conversation went on. Frederik Christian spoke his mind, for he was always forthright. Never an ambiguity was muttered from the corner of his mouth, unlike the majority of Danes. Sometimes they discussed theological matters. The boy far from agreed with him in everything concerning the manner of his practice, for instance the way he would put down dissenting voices by means of brute force, and then the eternal bone of contention concerning the deceased kin of baptized heathens, whether they were saved or lost. These conversations could be lengthy and heated. And in fact he learned from them, altering his practice and baptizing rather less selectively than before. It was Frederik Christian who changed his mind. Without him everything would still be like it was. And he never felt the urge to beat the lad. Strange. Apparently, thrashings are only for one’s flesh and blood.
These thoughts direct him to the mission room, to kneel and pray. Lord, forgive me. Or punish me immediately.
///
The first sign of disaster comes in August. A skin disease runs rampant, tormenting both Danes and Greenlanders. The afflicted scratch themselves until they bleed and are all but driven out of their minds by their itching. Kieding prescribes frequent washing in salt water and the application of fat. He applies leeches and cups, he lets blood. He places moist cloths on seeping, eczematous sores, only for the patients to swipe them away in order to scratch themselves. The wounds become infected. Arms become oedematous, glands swell in armpits, break through the skin, bleed and weep, veins become infected and to the eye seem to meander upwards through the arms, red and pronounced, advancing ever closer to the heart. Kieding knows then. Sepsis, as Hippocrates called it. It spreads through the blood vessels like a tree spreads its branches, sooner or later reaching the heart, from there to be slung in all directions. After that the end comes swiftly: spiking fever, death.
Smallpox, Kieding says to himself. And not a thing I can do about it.
///
A common cold, Egede thinks. It can strike hard at the natives.
The first to die is a Christian Greenlandic girl. She is ill for three days. Egede anoints her and they say the Lord’s Prayer together. She passes away with a happy smile on her mouth.
More become ill. He visits them in their peat-huts and tents. Often he meets the doctor on his way in or out. They discuss what the matter can be, for now it is clear to them that something malicious has come to the colony and is spreading.
It must be something brought with the ship, says Kieding cautiously. He knows Egede will be angry if he speaks of the pox.
My thoughts exactly, says Egede. But what?
An epidemic catarrh, influenza perhaps.
You mean something infectious?
Clearly. And with the numbers who have come streaming to the colony during the summer we can brace ourselves for a dismal autumn.
But the primary source, says Egede. Who can it be?
No one in the Caritas showed any particular signs of epidemic disease, says Kieding. Apart from the girl who died on board.
Then how can it be that this . . . epidemic . . . should break out so suddenly now?
The girl most likely passed it on to someone who took it ashore as a dormant passenger, not making itself known until the second or third party removed.
Is that possible?
It is often seen – in certain diseases. But the intermediate links in the chain of infection will themselves become ill sooner or later. And in the meantime they infect others. We can do nothing but wait and see.
And pray to the Lord, says Egede.
Yes, let us do so, Kieding replies, and strokes his long beard philosophically.
At the beginning of September the death toll increases dramatically. Many have contracted the rash and their skin is a mess of red blisters which ooze after only a few hours. Soon the afflicted will display bloodshot eyes, spontaneous bleeding from eyes, nose, mouth and genitals, blisters will spread to cover the body, whereafter internal haemorrhaging occurs, manifesting itself in swollen bellies, pallor, loss of consciousness and death. Egede will still hear nothing of smallpox. He flies into a fury if he even hears the whisper of it.
There is no pox here! he barks.
The next day he says to Kieding in private: What if it does turn out to be the pox?
And the next day again: Who do you think might have brought this pox to the colony, Kieding?
I am in no doubt, the physician replies. It is the boy, Carl. He has most likely been carrying it since Denmark, where the girl too was smitten.
But he has not been ill?
He has been rolling drunk the whole time, says Kieding. I imagine it has camouflaged the disease somewhat in his case.
He has been all over the colony, Egede says pensively.
Yes, he has been the perfect carrier, says Kieding, and smiles.
///
4 September sees the death of Greenland’s king, the boy Carl. His body is dumped in a mass grave. There is no one to cry over him, for his family are all deathly ill.
Egede goes to see the Moravian brethren. He needs to get away. The Germans are erecting a house at the southern end of the peninsula, half a fjerdingmil from the colony. They say they have found a great stack of old timber down by the ship harbour, obviously left behind from the early colony days. Egede says nothing of it. He ought to speak up. Strictly speaking it is theft of the King’s property. But he remains silent on the matter. The three men are clearly in high spirits and filled with the joy of life, quite untouched by the ongoing calamity on the other side of the fell. Is there anything I can help you with? he asks. They hand him a hammer.
For a whole day he labours with the Germans. He knocks in nails, saws timber, levels the ground for the foundation wall, digs holes for the uprights. They exchange barely a word, but sweat together in the sun, drinking water from the beck and frying fish over a fire. Can it be true? he wonders. That they are blessed by the Lord?
Late in the evening he returns home and goes directly to bed, quite exhausted from flexing muscles sorely unused to being flexed. Gertrud is up, attending a sick mother and her several children who have moved in. He is once more in the thick of it.
The epidemic is now a frenzy. Kieding and Egede endeavour to contain it by forbidding all movement about the district. One might just as well forbid birds to fly or fish to swim. People are scared. Rumours run rife among Danes and Greenlanders alike, rumours of a curse, of a naked man going about blowing on all the houses. The natives flee in all directions. The fjord teems with kayaks and umiaks, laden to the brims with sick people whose only thought is to get away. News arrives of sickness and death in the skerries too. The epidemic crosses the waters. Terror spreads like a wildfire, and in its wake follows the epidemic. And soon they see a counter-movement, natives fleeing to the colony to seek protection there. The numbers of sick and dead rise by the day.
The central room of the colony house, the mission room which is also Egede’s study, now doubles as a hospital. Gertrud attends the afflicted, she gives the children goat’s milk, she boils broth and gruel and brings it to the sick, she holds the dying by the hand, prays with them and comforts the bereaved. The girls, Petronelle and Kirstine, help her. They work around the clock, allowing themselves not a minute’s rest and forgetting completely to look after themselves, to eat and sleep, if only for the briefest time. In the mornings, men come and remove the bodies of those who have died in the night and toss them in the mass grave.
Egede makes a tour of inspection in the district, wading through the dead who have been left to lie where they fell, many with the pulp of chewed hide still in their mouths, for with the men too weak to hunt, the coverings of the kayaks have been their only food. Corpses float in the fjord, bobbing on the swell. The worst thing is to arrive at a settlement and crawl inside the dwelling, not because of the dead who await him inside, but because of the one or more children still half-alive, alone and gasping among stiffened corpses. He gathers them up and brings them back with him, delivering them into the hands of Gertrud. But they too perish. He carries them out of the house and dumps them in the grave as if they were kitchen waste.
Panic spreads. This is a threat from which there is no hiding. In fact, hiding only makes it worse. The colony is teeming, a constant influx and outflux of natives seeking help or hastening away. Almost all fall sick regardless. Nine out of ten perish. Those who remain unaffected are picked out as sorcerers and are murdered or else elect to drown themselves. A boy points the finger at his own mother’s sister. He tells his father he saw her standing at the foot of the bed gesticulating peculiarly and pulling faces at him. Resolutely, the father cuts her throat, though to no avail: the following night both father and son succumb. In the skerries, children stagger about, wailing in grief and despair, alone. They clutch their mother’s corpses, suck in desperation on their breasts. Tents containing the bodies of whole families are torched and burnt to the ground. The natives strike out to the south, to the north, away from the district, as far away as possible. And with them travels their infectious disease.
///
1 November. The dead outnumber the living. Strewn about the landscape they lie, as if in the aftermath of some clash of militaries, the victors long since departed. In the sea they float like flotsam after a naval dispute. The natives turn to Egede. Who is doing this to us? Is it God or the Devil?
God’s wrath is upon you, he tells them, seizing the opportunity to put the fear of the Lord into them that they might at last be imbued with the requisite solemnity to become good Christians. He is angry with you for not listening to and living by His message. You engage in fornication and adultery and indulge in sinful relationships. You live in polygamy even though I have told you it is an abomination to the Lord.
But why is he first angry with us now? they ask. We have always lived that way.
Because you have heard the message and are now free to choose the path of righteousness or the path of evil. And you have chosen the path of evil. Therefore God is angry.
They are crushed to hear him say this. They weep heart-rendingly and beg him for mercy.
Help us, palasi! Plead for us!
Then come to me, he says. Follow me and I shall redeem you. But you must abandon your old ways, renounce your faith in the shamans and the beliefs of old.
Yes, they reply. Whatever you say.
But it is too late. These people too perish. And Egede is on his knees in the mission room, his folded hands raised towards the cross on the wall.
Thank you, Lord!