Lofoten Quotes

Assad: 'I have written it just down here.' He Pointed to a number of Arabic symbols that could just as well have meant it was going to snow in the Lofoten Islands in the morning.

sir?’ ‘The ship’s captain on such occasions will be in bed with a high fever and will be asleep.’ It might have been a better idea, Magnusson thought, to have made him the ship’s captain, but he supposed a naval ship had to have a naval captain. ‘I see, sir,’ he said. The admiral gestured. ‘A great deal will depend on you, my lad,’ he said briskly. ‘Which is why you’re being done the honour of a personal briefing, something not normally granted to a junior officer. At the right time a sighting will be reported, showing you to be in mid-Atlantic, and inevitably the Germans will pick it up. Another sighting will be arranged later to show you off the Faeroes. In fact, you will sail up the Irish Sea, through the Minches, and, keeping well out from land to avoid being spotted, you will make your landfall west of the Lofotens and put into Narvik. There, you will be informed of what’s going on by our contact, a woman called Annie Egge, who runs the Norwegian equivalent of our Missions to Seamen. She will give you – you, Magnusson, because as the linguist, she’ll be dealing with you – she will give you your information. I don’t know what she’s like – like most middle-aged ladies who run Missions to Seamen, I suppose – all God and woollen comforts – but she has been feeding us reliable information for some time about German shipping, gleaned no doubt over the cups of tea and the meat and potato pie or whatever it is they serve up in Norway. Since, in the event of a German move into Norway, we shall need to know a few facts, you will keep your eyes open and take note of all Norwegian naval vessels, fortifications and movements, and all army and air force installations. You will remain there for several days under the guise of Finnish sailors making repairs after the voyage across the North Atlantic to enable you to reach Mariehamn.

Deepwater violated that agreement shockingly, manifesting a substance on which most modern human life depends but that few people encounter in the raw. After returning from Norway, I would learn that the Moskstraumen Maelstrom had become literally enabling of the oil industry. In the 1980s a man called Bjørn Gjevig – an antiquarian scholar, professional mathematician and amateur sailor, who seems as if he must have been invented by Poe, but truly exists – became fascinated by the hydrodynamics of the Maelstrom. Using data gathered in part while sailing close to the whirlpool, Gjevig began to model the maths of its currents. When oil was discovered off the Lofotens, he realized that his data had gained application: oil companies would need to understand such ocean forces in order to construct rigs that could withstand ‘destructive currents of the kind found in the Maelstrom’. At the climax of Poe’s story, the human body loses all volition and becomes a kind of drift-matter, helpless within the ‘destructive currents’. The fisherman and his brother are drawn steadily deeper into the vortex. The fisherman realizes that he has entered a giant grading-machine, which weighs and measures the objects that have been pulled into it – and moves the heaviest and most irregularly shaped items to destruction at its base.

Ik schrijf alles op, want denken helpt niet. Mijn kop draait kronkels en mijn buik verzet zich koortsig als ik de vragen van die vrijdag op een rij wil zetten. Het is alsof mijn lijf niet weten wil wat er toen gebeurd is. Alsof mijn ogen de beelden hebben gewist, alsof mijn oren de gil hebben gesmoord in de donkere spelonken van mijn hoofd, alsof mijn geheugen die ene seconde voorgoed heeft uitgeveegd.