The Voice of a Leper

The Voice of a Leper

I was on a two-week vacation in Iceland, and had spent most of my first days there exploring the capital city of Reykjaivik. I decided this morning that I would drive a little outside of town, somewhere near where I could look out at the ocean and see the volcano-produced peninsula (almost all of the Icelandic landscape was volcano-produced) that was not far away. I had seen a picture in the room that I was staying in, and I wanted to see it for myself by facing it from the side on the mainland and take my own photographs. My destination was a district known as Laugarnes, a popular place for tourists and Icelanders to take a walking tour.

I turned off one of the main roads onto a short paved pathway that led to small parking lot.  From there I could see a walkway close to the edge of the cliff that dropped down to the sea. When I got out of the car I walked over to a couple of signs written in English that showed a bit of the hidden history of the area. One had a picture of workers putting the finishing touches in 1898 on a hospital for patients with leprosy. The second showed the building as it stood from that year to 1943, when it burned down to the ground. It stopped being a leprosy hospital in 1940. In its last years it provided quarters for the occupying forces in World War II. I read that later on.

Reading the words ‘leprosy’ and ‘leper’ I didn’t think of people in the (literally) dying years of the 19^th and first half of the 20^th century, but of stories in the Bible of the healing of lepers performed by Jesus. I looked around to see if there were any remnants of the building still to be found. I only saw an empty field covered with grass. As an archaeologist, I had to look more closely for signs of the hospital that had been there, but saw none in the field. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place.

A Voice Is Heard

But then I heard someone speaking in what I knew was Icelandic. One of the words was one I had heard before ‘hjálp’ meaning ‘help’. I had learned it when someone at the hotel desk asked me if I needed some help. I know that I was looking quite bewildered, helpless and lost at the time. 

But in this case, the word was repeated over and over again, always softly but getting ever closer to me as if carried by the wind like paper on which words were written. I looked around for the speaker, but saw no one. I did see the grass move towards me, without any sense of a breeze coming in my direction.

Feeling that I was being directed somehow, I walked towards the cliff edge. When I looked down, I saw near the top of the edge what my archaeological eye suggested to me was a femur or upper leg bone of a human that was not particularly tall, a bone that had been part of the cliff for years. It clearly was not a volcanic rock. I sat down on the ledge, and took a couple of close-up pictures of my discovery. 

I heard the word ‘takk’, which I knew to mean ‘thank you,’ repeated several times by a voice to which no visible body appeared to be connected.  The word had had been one of the first words of Icelandic that I had learned, heard in situations in which the meaning seemed obvious. I had also seen ‘velkominn’ in a couple of hotel posters along with ‘welcome,’ so I said that word in reply.  It seemed appropriate at the time. 

What Should I do Now?

           What should I do now? I could just use the pictures to tell a ‘strange tale’ on my trip to Iceland, but that seemed to be an inadequate response to my situation. I knew where the University of Iceland was, so I got back into my rented car, and drove back to where the university was located in downtown Reykjaivik. When I got there, upon asking several people, I was led to the Department of Archaeology.  I knocked on the first office door I could see that had a professor in it. There are professorial looks that cross national borders. 

I introduced myself as being an archaeologist from Canada. I then showed him the pictures that I had taken. Of course, I did not tell him how I had been led to see it.  I would then have lost all credibility as a scholar.  I merely mentioned that I had seen it in the territory where there once was the hospital for those afflicted with leprosy. He knew of the hospital. I told him that I had speculated that the human bone might be one of the patients who had died, and with the power of fear of the word ‘leprosy’ might have led to a hasty, unofficial burial. He agreed, and called several of his colleagues, who gathered together quickly owing to the intrigue of the matter. Among his colleagues that came to his office was the head of the department. She apparently had a lot of clout with the local city administration. She called the municipal office and had a long conversation. After she hung up, she told me that the Reykjaivik borgarstjóri (which she explained was the mayor) had agreed to a small excavation on the site where the leg bone had been found. He had a lot of authority in the city. An excavation would soon follow.

What the Archaeologists Found

           The archaeologists found almost the complete set of bones of what appeared to be a  woman. When the borgarstjóri (I now can think of the word without looking it up in my Icelandic dictionary) was informed, he said that he would arrange for a burial with publicity pomp and ceremony (the words of my thoughts, not his words), and the erecting of a gravestone, with the woman’s name to be added when and if it were to be discovered. This would take longer than my stay in the country. But I promised myself, the archaeologists and the borgarstjóri that I would return to see the gravestone, hopefully with her name engraved upon it. 

My Return

A month later I received an e-mail telling me that the burial and gravestone were both completed, and, against the odds, her name had been found. Her first name was Gudrun (‘God’s secret lore’), said to be the most common Icelandic female name, one often occuring in the sagas or traditional stories of the people.  I booked a flight immediately.

Once there I arranged for a taxi to drive me to the burial site, and drive me back once I had taken a few pictures. When I stood in front of the grave stone and was about to take a few pictures to go with a my bone photographs, I heard a ‘takk’ spoken softly. Velkominn Gudrun, I replied.