On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg

Therefore he asked the believers, whether they would also believe themselves to see a mirage of Italy, if they should see an Italian landscape, and when they answered, "Yes," he decided to combine the useful with the pleasant and by a few small changes fulfil his promise to form an exotic landscape for Miss Mary's birthday, so that by the next mirage it would loom up against the horizon on a grand scale when seen through the colossal magnifying glass, that the different density of the air strata afforded.

Sitting in his boat, he aimed towards the Sword-islet with his diopter, the lenses of which he had considerably increased in power. Now the first question was how to get the most characteristic features of the formation, viz., the stratified rocks, to come forth, and this nature had partly done. After this he needed a stone pine, a cypress, a marble palace and a terrace with oranges on espaliers.

After scanning and outlining the skerry, he had the scheme clear and soon landed with his boat in which was stowed a crow bar, a ship scraper, a roll of zinc wire and a bucket of yellow ocher with a big tar brush, besides an ax, a saw, nails and a stock of dynamite cartridges.

When he had landed and packed up his belongings, he felt himself a Robinson Crusoe, who had taken up a battle with nature, but much sharper and surer of victory as he had brought along the means of culture. After he had placed the plane table on a tripod and upon this the alidade, he started to work.

The mountain ridge, whose tilted folds happily imitated the southern sedimentary strata, needed only to be scraped so as to remove the lichens, where there were any, leaving some horizontal stripes darker than the folds. It was not heavy work; the ship scraper glided over the smooth surface as a retouching brush on the scene painter's big canvas.

Sometimes he felt with disgust that he was throwing time and power away on childish things, but the bodily exertion sent the blood to his head, so that he saw small things bigger than they were; felt something of a Titan, who stormed the universe, corrected our Maker's mistakes, and wriggled the earth's axis so that the south came a little northward.

After he had striped the rocky wall, for a few meters, which was all that was needed as it was to be multiplied by the air strata, he went to manufacture the stone pine. On the hillock's crest stood a group of low arborescent pines, which together only miraged as the border of a forest. The thing was to cut down half a dozen trees to isolate the best one which would be silhouetted against the sky.

To saw down the supernumerary trees was the work of half an hour. The one that was left was slender with all its vegetative energy gathered at the top, because the others standing so close had hindered the formation of branches on the trunk. But now he must thin the crown with an ax so that the characteristic umbrella frame with its ribs came out. It was easily done, but when he afterwards looked at his creation with the diopter he still saw that the style was not perfect and that the top branches must be stretched upwards with zinc wire and the side branches somewhat downwards and outwards. When the stone pine was completed, he took a glass of wine and selected the material for the cypresses. This soon presented itself in the form of a pair of pointed junipers, which he only needed to select so that they rose against the sky, and trim them with an ax and the knife. But as they were somewhat too light, he took a pail of water and stirred some ivory-black in it and sprinkled them with the wash until they had a perfect churchyard green.

When he contemplated his work, he became dejected, and recollected a dark story of the girl who stepped on the loaf of bread; and when the white mews gave forth dreadful cries above his head, he thought of the two black ravens which came from heaven to take her soul down to hell.

After he had sat a moment and the blood had returned to his brain, he smiled at his work and at his childish fear. If nature herself had not gone exactly so hastily to work with the origin of species it was not lack of good will, only lack of ability.