The Fall of the King

By Johannes V. Jensen

... When Anders Graa had shot the horse, the knacker had his turn at it. He cut it up out in the snow, and Mikkel stood and watched him dismember it.
    It took place in the moonlight early one morning with heavy frost. The snow stretched for miles under the feeble, spectral candlelight in the western sky. It lay with a bluish cast far out over the meadows and arched over the hills in nebulous whiteness. It was impossible to distinguish between the pallid gleam and the snow-banked earth. It was so cold that the snow crunched loudly underfoot and fingers tingled, as if touched by dripping acid. But through the frozen death of the meadow crept the brook, black and open and incurably alive.
The knacker threw Anders Graa´s horse over on its back and began to cut it open. The blood lay in a big brown puddle, melting down into the snow, and the pinkish froth turned quickly to ice. With every stroke of the knife color welled up out of the steaming carcass - marvellous shades of blue and red gleaming from the flesh. Shreds were still twitching, jerking, quivering in the frosty air. The severed muscles writhed like worms licked by the flames. The long windpipe was laid bare, the back teeth exposed like four rows of mystic characters. A delicate pink membrane appeared, patterned with a myriad of blue veins, like a countryside scored by many rivers and seen from a great height. When the thorax was opened it was like a cave, with great whitish-blue membranes hanging down, brown and black blood coming out of small holes in the veined walls, and yellow fat stretching from top to bottom in elongated, dripping masses. The liver was more vividly brown than any other brown thing in the world. The spleen appeared, blue and dappled like the night and the Milky Way. And there were many other bright colors - entrails of blue and green, bits and pieces that were brick- red and ocher-yellow.
   All of the luxuriant, garish colors of the East - the gold of the sands of Egypt, the turquoise of the skies over the Tigris and Euphrates - all the rampant colors of India and the Orient unfolded there in the snow under the knacker´s filthy knife.


Extract from The Fall of the King (Mermaid Press, 1992)

Translated by Alan G. Bower