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 je imela zapisan en sam kraj in nobene predstave, kje je."Mi lahko poveste, kako pridem tja?"je pri zajtrku vprašala ovco. Držite se obalne ceste proti zahodu, je rekla ovca, dokler se zemlja ne neha delati, da ima griče. Zaliv Skaill je dolg lok bledega peska, za njim pa zelena polica, in prav na tej polici stoji vas, do polovice pogreznjena v tla, s strehami, odprtimi v nebo.

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.

Tisto jutro je po najdišču delal ostrigar, ostrigarje pa se sliši tudi v slabem vremenu. Polly je rekla:"Rada bi izvedela zgodovino tega spomenika."Ljudje so tu živeli pred kakimi pet tisoč leti, ji je povedal. To obalo so obdelovali pred Stonehengeom in pred Veliko piramido. Potem jih je prekril pesek in ostal približno štiri tisoč let, dokler ni nevihta pozimi leta tisoč osemsto petdeset odnesla sipine.

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.

Polovico tega je odnesel veter, zato je Polly prosila še enkrat."Mi lahko to, prosim, ponovite?"Drugo pripovedovanje je imelo podrobnost, ki šteje. V vsaki hiši je isto pohištvo v istem razporedu: ognjišče na sredini, ob obeh straneh vzidani postelji, ob nasprotni steni pa kamnita omara, obrnjena proti vratom. Kamnita je zato, ker lesa ni bilo.

"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.

"Mi lahko poveste, ali je muzej jutri odprt?"je vprašala Polly, ki je že vedela, da se bo vrnila. Nekaj časa je stala na robu ene od odprtih hiš in gledala v prostor, urejen tako, kot prostore ureja vsakdo: lepe stvari tam, kjer jih obiskovalec zagleda najprej.