Jón leaped up and down, whooping for joy: “It’s a miracle, it’s a miracle!”
A moment later the landlord was banging on his door and shouting, “How many candles are you burning in there, Jónsson? Put them out before you catch the building on fire!”
“Why, I’m not burning any!” Jón replied, and started to laugh.
The landlord threw the door open and stomped into the room. He had no sooner entered than he backed stiffly out again, eyes wide. “What in heaven’s going on?” he said, his voice odd and high.
“You’re dreaming,” Jón replied. “Better go back to bed.”
“Yes, yes, back to bed,” the landlord mumbled. “Quite right.” And he shuffled away down the hall.
Jón closed his door and got to thinking. If this box could hold on to daylight securely, perhaps there was money to be made from it. First, though, he had to understand a few things. How much light could it hold, and how long could it be held on to? The next day, he set off to find out.
Jón Jónsson saddled his horse and rode up into the highlands. When he came to a barren place where there were no people around for miles, he began to gather as much daylight as he could and stuff it into his box. For three days he rode back and forth in neat rows, as if tilling a vast field, so as not to miss a single ray. He climbed peaks so he could pull light from highest reaches of the sky, leaving cones of darkness above him and acres of it behind in long, zagging stripes. From a distance it looked as if sections of the earth had simply been vacuumed up. It so confused the wild rams and foxes that lived there that they would lie down to sleep in the middle of the day. Birds would not fly through the unnaturally dark areas and made long detours to avoid them.
When Jón’s box was stuffed to the lid and would hold no more, he rode back to Egilsstaðir to see about selling it. Certain he was about to become a rich man, Jón set up a tent in the town square and held a nighttime demonstration to show what his boxed daylight could do. Hundreds of curious townspeople gathered to watch.
The demonstration did not go well. First, Jón tried to show how the contents of his mysterious black box could be used to light very small spaces, like an outhouse.
“Imagine the call of nature wakes you in the night,” he explained to the crowd. “You’re half asleep and trying to light a lamp-flame in pitch darkness just so you can stumble outside and use the commode. It’s dangerous! But with my boxed light, you won’t need a lamp anymore—you can keep your outhouse lit round the clock!”
He’d brought a small, wooden outhouse into the tent, and now he pinched a little daylight from his box, tossed it inside, and shut the door. For a few seconds the outhouse shone brilliantly, shafts of light radiating through the cracks and seams in its frame, and the audience oohed and applauded. But they began to laugh as, moments later, all the light leaked from the outhouse, leaving the commode dark. Meanwhile, a luminous balloon of daylight rose through the air to become trapped in a distant fold of the tent ceiling, where it glowed uselessly, high out of reach. In an attempt to make his accident look intentional, Jón tried to brighten the whole tent by tossing handfuls of light into corners, but in his hurry he tripped and spilled half the contents of his box.
The light that escaped was so concentrated that it rendered several people temporarily blind.
Pandemonium erupted, the crowd ran screaming for the exits, and the tent went up in flames. As if that weren’t disastrous enough, the daylight then escaped into the general atmosphere and lit the night sky bright as day. It stayed like that for an entire week, during which time the people of Egilsstaðir developed insomnia and slept not a wink.
Needless to say, there was no demand for Jón’s boxed daylight. The townspeople wished only to be rid of it—and him—and Jón was told in no uncertain terms that it was time for him to leave Egilsstaðir. He rode away in shame, sorely disappointed.
Jón Jónsson drifted about the countryside, taking work where he could find it. He nearly forgot about his box of daylight, which he’d tied shut with string and stashed at the bottom of his knapsack. One day he was tarring boats in Húsavík when Tyr popped out from behind a pile of fishing nets.
“How’s it going with the box?” Tyr asked. “Got any money for me?”
“Not a farthing,” Jón grumbled. “The box is useless. You can have it back.”
“Keep it,” Tyr said. “You may find a use for it yet.”
“I doubt that,” Jón said, and he put down his tarring brush to reach for the box. By the time he’d pulled it from his knapsack, though, Tyr was gone.
The obsidian box had brought him only bad luck. Not only had it gotten him banned from Egilsstaðir, but ever since he’d started carrying it with him, he hadn’t been able to find more than a day’s work anywhere. Jón considered throwing it into the sea or leaving it under a rock for some other fool to find, but he couldn’t quite make himself do it. Just a few more days, Jón thought to himself. If I haven’t found a use for it by then, I’ll get rid of it.
Three days later, Jón was on the road between Húsavík and Akureyri when he met a fellow traveler.
“What news?” the man asked, as was the custom.
“The whale’s turd is heavier than the puffin’s,” said Jón, which was an old Icelandic way of saying nothing much. “What news have you?”
“The farmers of Egilsstaðir are in dire straits,” the man said. “It’s the height of growing season, but their volcano’s been acting up, spewing ash everywhere. The sun’s been blocked for weeks. It’s a real problem!”
“Is that so!” said Jón. “How interesting . . . I mean, how terrible!”
He bade the man good-bye and spurred his horse toward Egilsstaðir as fast as it would gallop.
Approaching the town, he saw dark clouds of ash clogging the sky, shading the land in a dusky, early evening dimness at noon. The crops had begun to wilt in the fields.
When Jón arrived, the farmers were holding an emergency meeting in the town hall. “What are we to do?” one of them was saying. “If this ash doesn’t clear soon we could lose our whole crop!”
“Perhaps I could be of help,” Jón said, and they all turned to see him standing at the door, the obsidian box in his hand. The farmers remembered what he had done—how his sunlight had lit up the night for a whole week—and they tripped over one another to give him their money.
Jón rode around town on his horse, distributing sunlight to each ailing farm—enough to bathe the fields of paying customers in sunlight, but no more. Their crops were revived to health within a few days, despite the ash that continued to blanket the sky.
Then Jón ran out of sun, and he had make another trip into the highlands to harvest more.
He was gone several days. By the time he returned, the light he’d sold the farmers had petered out, and they were growing anxious.
“We were worried that something had happened to you!” one of them said. “If you hadn’t come back, I don’t know what we would’ve done.”
“Never fear!” Jón replied. “I’m back, and I’ve got the best sunlight money can buy.”
He sold nearly all of it within a day. His pockets were bulging with money, and before long the farmer’s fields were bursting with healthy potatoes, leeks, and cabbages. Demand was so high that he had to raise his prices. The farmers grumbled about this a little bit, but they seemed to understand; it was business. Then Jón had an idea, and he went to look for Tyr in the lava field where he’d first appeared. He found the strange man dozing behind a mossy boulder and woke him.