Jón cursed his luck and hid his glowing hand behind his back. He didn’t want to help, but it seemed bad policy to refuse the landlord.

“I’ll be there in one minute,” Jón said, and closing the door he looked around for somewhere to stash his daylight. If I’m quick, he thought, perhaps it won’t have all leaked away by the time I return.

His eyes fell upon the obsidian box. Since no container was really secure, it seemed as good a place as any, so he stuffed in the light, replaced the box’s lid, and went outside. When he returned a few minutes later and peeked inside the box, he was astounded to discover that none of the daylight had escaped.

“What’s this!” he exclaimed, then realized he must have made a mistake. “Perhaps there was more light in here to begin with than I remember,” he said. “Yes, that must be it.”

Just to make certain, before he went to work the next morning, he took another handful of daylight from behind the sheep pen and stashed it in the box. When he returned in the evening, he found the box as full of light as it had been that morning. He was so unready for this that he let it slip through his fingers and it leaked out everywhere, filling his small room with daylight just as the sun was disappearing outside.

Jón leaped up and down, whooping for joy: “It’s a miracle, it’s a miracle!”

A moment later the landlord was banging on his door and shouting, “How many candles are you burning in there, Jónsson? Put them out before you catch the building on fire!”

“Why, I’m not burning any!” Jón replied, and started to laugh.

The landlord threw the door open and stomped into the room. He had no sooner entered than he backed stiffly out again, eyes wide. “What in heaven’s going on?” he said, his voice odd and high.

“You’re dreaming,” Jón replied. “Better go back to bed.”

“Yes, yes, back to bed,” the landlord mumbled. “Quite right.” And he shuffled away down the hall.

Jón closed his door and got to thinking. If this box could hold on to daylight securely, perhaps there was money to be made from it. First, though, he had to understand a few things. How much light could it hold, and how long could it be held on to? The next day, he set off to find out.

Jón Jónsson saddled his horse and rode up into the highlands. When he came to a barren place where there were no people around for miles, he began to gather as much daylight as he could and stuff it into his box. For three days he rode back and forth in neat rows, as if tilling a vast field, so as not to miss a single ray. He climbed peaks so he could pull light from highest reaches of the sky, leaving cones of darkness above him and acres of it behind in long, zagging stripes. From a distance it looked as if sections of the earth had simply been vacuumed up. It so confused the wild rams and foxes that lived there that they would lie down to sleep in the middle of the day. Birds would not fly through the unnaturally dark areas and made long detours to avoid them.