Climbing the slopes leading up to the plateau was taxing. Before she could reach the top, she had to lie down on the crunchy grass and rest. With her hand closed tightly around the car key, she closed her eyes. The sound of a gentle surf rose from the sea below. Birds screeching. A wondrous serenity filled her; when she suddenly let out a giggle, she started, because she didn’t realise the sound had come from her.

*

She climbed into the car and locked the doors. Violent shudders kept running through her body. She looked at herself in the mirror and then looked again. It was like seeing someone else.

Her hands were weak and trembling; she put them in her armpits to warm them and calm the shaking. After a while, she felt a bit better. At that point, she turned the engine on. She reversed out and followed the road leading down from the mountain. The car struggled over sharp stone shards and through small, water-filled cauldrons. She drove carefully. If the car broke down, she would break down too.

At some point, she had glimpsed the sun like an elusive lantern behind the clouds, but she was too exhausted to even attempt celestial navigation. She felt she knew which direction was south, but no road led that way, it was just an endless prairie. On her left, she could see a sliver of sea. Far away on her right was a sign. A sign with white text against a blue background. She decided to drive toward the sign because she figured it would announce the name of a village waiting on the other side of the ridge. ‘Domen 410 ft above sea level’, it read. Not a village. A mountain. And there it was, the mountain called Domen, barren and dark.

Pressing on seemed as good as turning back.

After a few miles, she spotted a rest stop with a picnic bench and an information board. She slowed down and turned around. The board itself was long gone; in its place a hyper-realist landscape painting of a few utility poles wandering in a straight line in the distance had been installed. At the top of its frame was written ‘VARDØ – ULTIMA THULE’. She opened the glove compartment and snatched out the manual and papers and found the road map, a spiral-bound book. But Norway was nothing but a grey appendix to Sweden. She sat there with the map on her lap, thinking, trying to remember what the Scandinavian peninsula looked like in detail. Then she rolled back out on the road and drove back and when she reached the coast, she felt like she was on the right path.

*