The Prophets of Eternal Fjord Read Online Free Page A

and proceeds back along the highway. He passes through villages where the stench of soap-making and tanning hangs like some infectious fog, greasy and sticky in the air. He walks by the fields where cows peace­fully graze, and past dwellings where silent peasants stare at him from beneath their hats.
    In the city he devotes himself to his books, although abandoning divinity in favour of natural science. Driven by scholarly thirst, he seeks out and attends lectures whose subjects are anything other than the doctrines of the Trinity and transubstantiation. Thus, he immerses himself in one professor’s lecture on the hierarchical classification of all life on Earth, as elaborated by Linnaeus. There is booing, but also applause. The lecture, held in the Comedy House on account of the university’s unwillingness to provide a venue, opens his eyes in a new and surprising manner. The world is a connected whole! A banal real­ization once revealed, and yet a total reorganization of his consciousness, his picture of the world and of himself: I am a part of a connected whole.
    One of his friends, Laust, who studies medicine, invites him to the Academy of Surgery on Norgesgade, popularly called Bredegade, where he attends lessons on blood vessels and bones and nerve channels and glands. It is a journey inwards, whereas botany and zoology are journeys outwards, although just as staggering and just as eternal. And in such eternity, man is at the middle. So placed by the Lord.
    In the company of Laust he earns a small sum hauling corpses from the canals, or else they bribe a watchman to procure bodies and deliver them to the faculty’s vaults, where the professor stands ready with frigid eyes and a scalpel. With the instrument poised between three fingers as though it were a quill pen, the yellow skin of the corpse a parchment upon which he intends to jot down his thoughts, he informs the students of what they must pay attention to during the autopsy that will follow. He makes his incisions with casual exactness, exposes the greenly glistening muscles of the dead, layer by layer, allowing their shameful smells to be released into the air as the students snigger uneasily or exchange jokes in Latin, and the iridescent tinge of the intestines becomes, little by little, reflected on their own faces. But not on Morten Falck’s. He stands with the morning’s bread and warm gruel pleasantly wallowing inside his stomach and gazes in wonder upon these humans whose humanity is gradually removed from them as they become divided into their constituent parts according to the Latin nomenclature. Nerves, muscle fibres, the finely separated layers of cutis and subcutis, adipose tissue and organs, creamy yellow, salmon-pink, violet as a beet, as lustrous as varnish. The professor divides limbs from torsos, his knife descends into the tissue, splitting joint capsules, laying bare arteries and veins whose names he cheerfully lists. Morten thinks it sounds as if he is hailing them, as if at a morning roll call of a classical Roman college. Arteria carotis ! Nervus olfactorius ! Musculus mastoideus ! He listens to the professor’s explanations, which are always attended by a doleful clang of sarcasm, but also of solidarity with the deceased. As we are, so were you, and as you are, so will we become. After the shock of the vaults a number of students abandon the course in favour of other studies, devoting them­selves instead to the law, retiring to the estates of their fathers or else departing to the south on Grand Tours, where many end their days as drunkards tormented by fever. Morten Falck, the only one among them who knows he cannot complete the study and become a physician, remains.
    He is a regular guest of these dissections, even after Laust falls ill and must abandon the course. With his botanizing pad and his pencils he sits in the dim light and draws detailed anatomical sketches. The professor