The Village Under the Storm

Polly had one place written down and no idea where it was. "Can you tell me how to get there?" she asked the ewe over breakfast. Follow the coast road west, the ewe said, until the land stops pretending to have hills. The Bay of Skaill is a long curve of pale sand with a green shelf behind it, and the shelf is where the village sits, half sunk into the ground with its roofs open to the sky.

Polly mala zapísané jedno jediné miesto a netušila, kde je. "Viete mi povedať, ako sa tam dostanem?" spýtala sa ovce pri raňajkách. Choďte po pobrežnej ceste na západ, povedala ovca, kým sa krajina neprestane tváriť, že má kopce. Záliv Skaill je dlhý oblúk bledého piesku a za ním sa dvíha zelená terasa. Práve na nej stojí tá dedina, napoly zapadnutá do zeme, so strechami otvorenými do neba.

An oystercatcher was working the site that morning, and oystercatchers can be heard in weather. Polly asked, "I would like to know the history of this particular monument." People lived here about five thousand years ago, he told her. They were farming this coast before Stonehenge and before the Great Pyramid. Then the sand came over the top of them and stayed for roughly four thousand years, until a storm in the winter of eighteen fifty stripped the dune away.

V to ráno na lokalite pracoval lastúrničiar, a lastúrničiara je počuť aj vo vetre. Polly sa spýtala: "Chcela by som sa dozvedieť históriu tejto konkrétnej pamiatky." Ľudia tu žili asi pred päťtisíc rokmi, povedal jej. Toto pobrežie obrábali skôr, než vzniklo Stonehenge, a skôr, než postavili Veľkú pyramídu. Potom sa cez nich prevalil piesok a zostal tam zhruba štyritisíc rokov, kým v zime roku tisícosemstopäťdesiat neodniesla dunu búrka.

The wind took half of that, so Polly asked for it again. "Could you please repeat that for me?" The second telling had the detail that matters. Every house holds the same furniture in the same arrangement: a hearth in the middle, box beds at either side, and against the far wall a stone dresser facing the door. It is stone because there was no wood.

Polovicu z toho odniesol vietor, a tak Polly poprosila znova. "Mohli by ste mi to, prosím, zopakovať?" Druhé rozprávanie už obsahovalo detail, na ktorom záleží. V každom dome je to isté zariadenie v tom istom usporiadaní: ohnisko uprostred, lôžka po oboch stranách a pri protiľahlej stene kamenný príborník otočený k dverám. Je kamenný preto, že tu nebolo drevo.

"Could you tell me if the museum is open tomorrow?" Polly asked, already knowing she would come back. She stood a while at the edge of one open house, looking in at a room laid out the way anyone lays out a room, the good things where a visitor would see them first.

"Mohli by ste mi povedať, či je múzeum zajtra otvorené?" spýtala sa Polly, hoci už vedela, že sa sem vráti. Chvíľu stála na okraji jedného otvoreného domu a pozerala dnu do miestnosti zariadenej tak, ako si miestnosť zariaďuje ktokoľvek: pekné veci tam, kde ich návštevník uvidí ako prvé.