Heimweh; The siren; The loaded gun; Liebereich; "Iupiter Tonans;" "Sis;" Thor's emerald; Guile

by John Luther Long

In the dim past some castaways had here found a good refuge from the icy waters, and, having no hope of another country, had here set up their households. Their names perished. But their descendants, bound to the soil by an heredity stronger than either will or circumstance, kept their graves on the mountain side, which outnumbered many times the living.

For, each year, the sea and the glacier claimed their several victims.

The narrow strip of beach which led out to the south had been wider in the time of the castaways. Yet none had cared to pass by it into the better world that lay beyond—nor did they sail to it across the sea which had been so deadly to them all.

Thus the sum of their lives had been compassed in the Emerald of Thor. The sum of their necessities had ever been to keep life within and covering without their bodies. And these simple things had been hard to accomplish always. For the glacier encroached when the bar and the ice kept the warm current away, and the fish went with the current.

That duress of fear, which held the castaways, had passed upon their children. They coveted no more of the world than they saw about them. I think they scarce knew, in the passage of time, that there was else to the world than what they had.

In time this became patriotism. It was their unwritten treason to wish for another country.

This life, too, isolated in the deep heart of nature, had bred a habitude as simple as nature itself. They were true because they knew no falsehood. They were good because for them there was no evil. Wrong was the simple negation of right and needed no defining for the simple. Each had the obsession of it.

More and more precarious had their life become. In the last winter the ice had hung over them with an ominous menace. The current which was to bring their little summer was delayed very long, the fish were gone, and hunger come, so that they had begun to look each other in the eyes and ask:

“Brother in the Lord, is it now?”

For this was with them always—this certainty of their blotting out.