Jonas sat on the top of Lavvoai’vi, next to a trigonometric point, a pole, rather like a seamark in a sea of moss, lichen and stone and almost had to hang on to it, so mind-reeling were the prospects. Because there was something about this vast, untamed wilderness which also helped him to see the reason for the golden age which his country was living through: the gift granted to Norway was that of remaining untouched. Just as Europe had been thrown into chaos during the age of the great migration, while Norway was enjoying a time of plenty and prosperity when it could relax and consolidate its glorious Viking Age — so it was now, too. They had entered upon a new era of great migrations, and once more Norway had succeeded — again thanks to its strict legislation — in remaining untouched, if you didn’t count the handful of poor refugees who slipped through the needle’s eye, and a few thousand immigrant workers. It could, in fact, be on the threshold of a new golden age, while the rest of the world lay bleeding.
But — he could not rid himself of this thought — this was also his chance. The country was wide open to conquest. The whole of Norway lay spread before him like an enormous blank page.
This was also why he had, perhaps unwittingly, made for this spot. He did not want, like Nansen, to cross anything, or to reach some far frontier; he wanted to work his way inwards, into something, in towards a vital centre: the riddle that is Norway. If there was one place where he had a chance of finding an unknown — nay, unlikely — Norwegian reality, a vital source of inspiration, it had to be here. In the emptiness. He took another compass bearing, still due east, towards Urdutoai’vi, and tramped off, first down, then straight ahead, alongside lakes and over marshes dotted with reddish-orange cloudberry maps. Still no mosquitoes. He kept a sharp lookout in all directions, with the monotonous call of the golden plover in his ears. He was brimful of optimism, knew that there was a part of Norway that could not be pinned down on a map. Here, right here, at any minute, he might run into what he sought — a lion or, if nothing else, a diamond the size of a pinhead.
It was still abnormally hot. Plump white clouds, nigh-on identical to one another, glided across the sky at regular intervals, their bottom edges flattened out as if they were being pushed across a glass surface. Jonas felt an incipient tightening of his balls. Late in the afternoon the humming sound grew ominously louder, so much so that the whole plain suddenly sounded like a camouflaged generator. Jonas kept looking round about as he pitched camp on a knoll in a little hollow between Lavvoai’vi and Urdutoai’vi, right next to a stream. The sun was hovering low on the horizon, and he was on his way into the tent to unroll his sleeping bag when the ground began to shake, and at that same moment he heard the rumbling, it sounded as if a tank was driving straight for him.
He spun round. He had known, and yet not known. It was a dragon. At first he was disappointed. The next instant, delighted. Delighted because it confirmed that all his ingrained ideas about the world, everything he had learned in his twelve years of schooling, was wrong, or at any rate not the whole story. He also had time to think that Daniel ought to have been there, to see that Jonas was right: the Norwegian lion was not a lion. The creature in the national coat of arms, the creature that lived at the heart of Norway, was a dragon.
How did this dragon look? It was transparent. By which I mean, the dragon was made up of mosquitoes, millions of mosquitoes. It was formed, quite simply, out of the most common of all things. That was the secret: at the heart of Norway lived a dragon, a monster composed of small fry. And it emitted a shimmering glow, like the Northern Lights, or like something electrified. And here — at last — Jonas found the answer to the question of what sound a dragon makes. It hums. Like a transformer. He should have known it, because the dragon is a creature that has mastered the art of transformation.
For this reason he only saw the dragon clearly, in all its unnerving gruesomeness, at the second when he turned around — the next moment it was transparent, a dense swarm of glistening mosquitoes. Only when he had had his back to it had the dragon assumed its real form. Consequently there is only one way to slay a dragon, and Jonas instinctively knew how, had learned this skill long before, was not even surprised to find hidden strands in his life suddenly revealing themselves in this way, a little like the secret writing they used to do as children, which only became visible when you held the paper over the cooker ring. A dragon could only be killed by a discus throw, a swift, surprising pivotal action. Jonas stood with his back to it, picked up a flat, almost circular stone, a good two pounds in weight, stood with his back to it and gathered himself, hefted the stone disc in his hand, made a couple of swings, heard the hum turn into a roar, whirled round and threw the stone with all his might, like a discus, so that it struck the dragon right between the eyes, with a noise like that of a vase smashing, before it had time to become transparent. The dragon fell down dead, lay revealed as a true dragon in all its banality, as seen in countless pictures. It reminds me of something I’ve seen before, Jonas thought to himself, only it’s bigger.
And what did he do then? This too he knew by instinct. He took out his knife and cut the brain out of the dragon’s head. As he did so, the body crumbled into dust, leaving only the horns behind; they looked exactly like any old set of reindeer antlers. Jonas stood with the brain in his hand, surprised by how small it was, like a black-lacquer puck with a silvery pattern shining through when he turned it to the light. It smelled sweetish, like fruit. It should come as no shock to anyone that a dragon brain is prepared in the same way as one of Norway’s national dishes. Jonas boiled up water in a pan and gently laid the brain into it, just as one would do with slices of cod, and let it steep for a little while. The sight he beheld did not really surprise him: the black-lacquer appearance of the clump gradually changed, as if the dragon’s ability to metamorphose did not stop even when it was dead. Within a few minutes its dark aspect gave way to a dull white hue, like that of a lichee inside its shell or — why not? — a pearl. Jonas lifted out the brain and placed it on a pot-lid. He saw how it gave off a faint white glow, a glow that came from within.
He sliced off a piece and ate it, just as hunters eat a piece of the lion’s heart in order to steal the animal’s strength or, in Jonas’s case: its way of thinking. How did it taste? Warm. Like when you popped a torch into your mouth as a child. He took several bites, realizing as he did so what lay stored within the dragon’s brain, what that silvery pattern denoted: light. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be as valuable as any diamond, he thought.