Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness

It took the undersigned some time to pack his things into the duffel bag yet again, and especially to scribble out a summary of the day's events from memory. The shadows thrown on the ground by a low house, even by the wall of a vegetable garden, were so huge that they were completely unreal. But what drew me to the window was the unusual vehemence of the birds outside, violent aggression accompanied by screams that bore no relation to the neutral night-bleating such as I had become accustomed to hearing from the cliffs through my sleep. If one looked out during the night at this time of year one would see one or two birds at the most, gliding past on some inscrutable errand. By complete contrast, there were now countless myriads of birds eddying and screaming over the farmhouse and the homefield. There were not just kittiwakes there, the inhabitants of the cliff; fulmars and greater black-backed gulls from the fishing banks, herring gulls, and even great skuas had come to take part in this choir; as far as I could see, some of them were clawing at one another upside down in the air. The churchyard overflowed with these hell-birds; they were crowded on the church roof and the bungalow. As a reporter from the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs I had no other choice than to stare passively at this phenomenon of Nature; besides, I would have had no authority to shoot even if I had had a field-gun.

This fiendish uproar was at its height for about fifteen minutes, and then subsided. The churchyard, however, continued to be covered with birds; except that now they sat still as if they were holding a meeting over some matter of importance that had taken place, and only screeched one at a time. More and more of them took off and flew away in silence to the sea. Others peered all around as if they were waiting for another miracle. Why is it that birds look far bigger on the ground than in flight? They looked of supernatural size to me. At last my interest in natural history was exhausted and I left these birds to themselves on the graves of the dead in the dawn, and went to sleep. Should I not delete everything on these pages about birds and fish? But there's a risk that there would be little left if birds and fish are not to count.