Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness

From the doctor's pharmacy wafted an incredible stench, a mysterious odor that could leave one feeling like a stranger, a foreigner, with respect to the substances of one's own planet. And in the midst of that little world of vials and bottles, jars, urns, and glasses bearing labels with incomprehensible inscriptions, the doctor stood like a magician in a white smock, weighing out medicines on the wafer-thin pans of a balance and pouring the portions into small envelopes: a tall man, big boned and with a red moustache, smiling to himself, bowing to himself, and letting his eyelids droop as he regarded mother and daughter, as if he knew them and all their secrets and was implying to them that he would keep those secrets safe.

"Precisely," he said, smiling at them sweetly, meaningfully, humbly, magically, yet his body language unmistakably displayed the stoic awareness of the futility of it all possessed by a person accustomed to facing the great disease in its most egregious forms and who knows that despite all his mighty and mysterious medicines, there is only one true panacea; because of this, he came across as somewhat sardonic with regard to that world of his, in which the aromatic essences of earthly substances wafted in the name of the pharmaceutical arts up from jars and glasses, without it being certain whether they could actually ease people's ailments.