Independent People by Halldor Laxness

HE had walked all night.

He had set off at midnight, and by daybreak was nearing the western verge of the high heath. This was on a frosty morning of Holy Week. Slowly it was growing brighter; slowly night was disappearing behind him with a thousand steps, a thousand thoughts in wild confusion, like sleeplessness from the depths of night to the break of day. Soon dawn would throw its cold, shadowy light over the heath's frozen expanse, over the stony ridges that jutted above the snow, over the glittering ice of the hard-trodden bridle-path, and would gild them. And now once more his gaze travelled over the solvent world that he had bought so long ago, as he greeted it in the dim, grey-blue light preceding sunrise two weeks before the first day of summer, two weeks after the spring equinox. The marshes were still bound in ice, no sign of thaw on the lake, the moors in the south white-coated; and soaring up from them rose the Bluefells in mystic guise that had nowhere any kinship with the substance of the earth; or with the spirit of the earth. And there stood the man's little farmstead still under the rift in the mountain, with trodden snow all around and flood-water mark delineated by two filaments of ice in the gully above. From where he stood the outline of the roof could be made out quite plainly beneath its covering of snow. He set down his burden on the brow of the heath and, leaning against a cairn marking the road, gazed at his own land, the land that held his little nation; and that flower which inadvertently he had mentioned during the winter to-a total stranger. He stood there like an army that, having marched into other countries to wage desperate war, was returning now with victory in its soul; provisions from town; and-most remarkable of all-money in the co-operative society.