The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

The man who owned the pouches, as Runólfur Jónsson called him, or the commandant with the municipality, as Captain Hogensen called him, that is to say, the town's superintendent, as I thought he was – he was the one member of our fellowship who chiefly graced our company by his absence. I had lived with him ever since I was born; but that summer I discovered him at last by a complete and utter accident: there was a man there. It was like catching sight of a cairn that stands on a knoll to the south of the house; it has always been there, and that is why one never notices it. A generation passes, and then it suddenly comes to light that the cairn one saw so long ago must have been the noon-cairn.

I woke up with a start in the middle of the night at the beginning of the hay-harvest; not really in terror, that would be saying too much, but certainly more than a little startled to hear the voice of the superintendent, and particularly on discovering that he was talking about something other than eagles and mice. I am sure that if he had been confiding to my grandmother that a little mouse had had a litter under the threshold of his establishment that day, or even if he had been bellowing this information into Captain Hogensen's leather eardrums, nothing would have happened. I woke up because this phantom person was whispering confidentially with one of his friends; and because the subject of their conversation was the world and time, as well as mankind and the purpose of human achievements on earth; and the discussion was accompanied by the chink of that metal which many people regard more highly than silver and copper, and only a very few value lower than dirt.