The Story of the Blue Planet (4 page)

“I’ll show you.”

Mr. Goodday walked over to Magni and sprinkled the powder over his hands. At first nothing happened, but then it was as if he was becoming light as a feather, and then, suddenly, he floated up off the ground and hovered over their heads. The children caught their breaths in amazement.

“I’m flying! I’m flying!” shouted Magni.

The kids on the ground burst into laughter.

“He’s flying!” they shouted, laughing and dancing.

“I’m flying!” Magni shouted. “This is the greatest fun I’ve ever had!”

He glided in the air like a bird. He flew in circles, did a few dives, and his tummy tingled with excitement. He hung onto branches, took kiwi fruits and oranges from the tops of trees, and threw them down to the others.

“This is fantastic. This is just unbelievably fantastic. This is unbelievable, stupendous fun! Mr. Goodday is the jolliest man in the world!” he shouted.

“Now we’ll call him nothing else but Jolly-Goodday!” cried Hulda.

“Hooray for Jolly-Goodday!” the children all shouted as one.

“How much does the butterfly powder cost?”

“Nothing, my dear children. You can have it for free.”

“Hooray!”

The children gathered and jostled round Jolly-Goodday, and from the crowd could be heard shouts and cries of “May I? Me next! Then me! Me too!” And they all received butterfly powder on their arms.

“We’re free like butterflies!” shouted the children.

Brimir and Hulda glided hand in hand all round the island that day. They saw places no child had ever seen before. They saw spring waters in the forest where the green crocodiles lay white eggs. They flew over hidden valleys between glaciers with dinosaur bones, and they could look straight down into a volcanic crater with its bubbling lava.

Hulda sat on the crater’s edge and stared into the melted rocks. She could feel the burning heat. Brimir sat next to her, picked up a large pebble, and threw it into the crater. The stone melted and became floating lava. Hulda tied some string around a chunk of seal meat from the previous day and lowered it down into the crater. The chunk was cooked in an instant and they drew it up grilled and juicy from the fire.

“There’s one thing I’d like to see,” said Hulda, munching on her meat.

“What’s that?” asked Brimir, licking his fingers.

“I want to see the lions.”

Brimir’s eyes brightened and his heart beat faster. He had only once seen a lion from a great distance, and had never dared go near them. They glided off to the great plain where a pride of lions lay at ease under an oak tree, bad-tempered male lions, with bloody teeth and great manes, and some fierce lionesses, with cute little cubs playing all around them. The children circled over the tree and perched like sparrows on a branch. The lions stood up and growled.

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“Ha, ha! You can’t get me!” cried Brimir as he threw acorns at the lions.

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“Eat me if you can!” said Hulda growling back.

Their hearts pounded faster when the biggest lion with the biggest mane gripped the bark with its claws and inched its way up the tree. They had often heard horrible stories of lions that devoured every last morsel of a child and left nothing behind but a gnawed skeleton in the grass.

“Let’s fly away now,” said Brimir.

“Not just yet.”

“Does the powder ever stop working?”

“Not while the sun’s shining.”

The lion clawed itself higher and higher up the tree. It growled so ferociously that the leaves paled and the berries fell to the ground.

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The lion sprang onto the branch just below the children as a cloud was fast approaching the sun.

“Quick,” said Hulda, “let’s fly away!”

They flapped up into the air and left the lion completely baffled in the tree.

“GRR! What kind of creatures are you anyway?”

“We’re flying penguins,” cried Brimir, and he burst out laughing. “This is more fun than the weirdest dream!” They flew away laughing over lakes and forests, mountains and rivers.

Ragnar the mountain-climber flew up all the mountaintops on the island before he let his most treasured dream come true and flew twice to the peak of the Blue Mountains and then down again.

“Wow, this was the best day of my life,” he shouted. “It was fantastic!”

“Yeah, the next most fun day is really dull and boring compared to this one,” said Brimir.

“I don’t understand how we could have ever lived without this fantastic butterfly powder,” said Hulda with the broadest of smiles.

Evening Falls, the Sun Sets

But the butterfly powder only worked while the sun shone, and when the sun began to set the children’s flying powers grew weaker until they were as heavy and earthbound as they had been before. The children rushed backwards and forwards like wing-clipped birds, some flapping their arms and hopping in the air.

“Oh, it’s so boring when the sun has set and the sky becomes red in the west and black in the east,” said Elva before she jumped off a low ledge and crashed onto a pile of rocks.

“I think so too,” said Magni, pouting. “You stop having butterflies in your tummy and you’re as heavy as lead and can’t fly anymore. It’s terribly boring.”

“It’s so tiring to walk,” said Ragnar.

“I think it’s so boring to sleep,” said Elva. “Our dreams are colorless compared to the fun we have during the day.”

The next day, the very same thing happened all over again: the kids flew and glided and laughed themselves silly, but when the sun set they all became very moody and silent, each sitting alone, waiting for the sun to rise again. No one could be bothered to sleep because the reality of the day had become so much more fun than the dreams of the night.

At last the children decided to go down to Black Beach and ask Jolly-Goodday if he could make the butterfly powder work at night as well. It was very early in the morning and the sun had hardly risen. Jolly-Goodday slept under a woollen blanket on a deck chair on the beach. He had sleep in his eyes and hair on his toes. He yawned when the children woke him.

“YAWN,” he yawned. “What do you all want?”

“The nights are so dull,” the children complained.

Jolly-Goodday was very understanding.

“Do you find your dreams unexciting?”

“Yeah, sleeping is so dull and boring, we want to fly at night too. You have to find a way.”

Jolly-Goodday thought deeply, mulled things over, and racked his brains so much he almost split his mind in two.

“I’m sure I can fix it, and it won’t cost much at all.”

“Hooray, hooray!” shouted the children. “Jolly-Goodday knows everything! How much will it cost?”

“Really nothing at all and less than that.”

“How little?”

“Maybe just a tiny bit of youth.”

“Youth?”

“In your hearts there’s a very deep well that waters your soul and it’s full to the brim of youth.”

“Are you going to take our youth?”

“No, no, no. Not all of it, just a tiny little bit. Less than 1% of all your youth, less than one sip from a glass.”

“And we won’t change at all?”

“Not at all really. You won’t grow any smaller and you won’t grow any bigger.”

“Ha, ha,” laughed the children, “who minds giving up a tiny bit of youth in exchange for much more fun?”

“How is it done?”

Jolly-Goodday put on a very wise expression and showed them drawings and data sheets.

“At noon, when the sun is at its highest, I’ll take a big nail and nail the sun to the heavens above your island. Then it’ll always be day and always be bright and you can fly and fly endlessly as much as you want without sleeping ever again.”

“Wow! Fantastic!” said the children.

Everyone waited impatiently for noon. Then Jolly-Goodday got up out of his deck chair, went into his spaceship, and fetched a gigantic ladder, an enormous hammer, and a stupendous nail. He rested the ladder on the end of a white cloud.

Jolly-Goodday put on pitch-black sunglasses to avoid being blinded and slipped polka-dot oven mitts over with the hammer and nail high up into the blue sky and nailed the nail into the middle of the sun with a noise that echoed throughout the whole world.

BANG!
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BANG!

Golden sunbeams flew everywhere and landed in the sea hissing and bubbling. Jolly-Goodday then jumped off the ladder and glided down to earth in a flower-patterned parachute.

“The sun won’t leave now, kids. You need never again say good morning or goodnight. Eternal day reigns on your island.”

“Hooray, hooray,” shouted the children, “now there’s eternal day. Jolly-Goodday’s got the answer to everything.”

It’s safe to say there had never been as much fun for the children on the island as right at that moment. The sun was always high in the sky and never moved, but shone and shone so that no one needed to sleep. The flowers blossomed with loud bangs and the island became a sea of flowers in the ocean. The lemons turned yellow. The apples reddened. The trees turned green and grew with cracks and groans, and the growing of the grass could be heard far out to sea.

The kids could fly and fly and no one noticed the passing of time. They saw no stars in the sky, just continuous noontime sunshine and endless fun and games, and no one was bored for a single minute. Everyone was ecstatically happy, with suntans, broad smiles, and tummies full of butterflies.

Wolf! Wolf!

But then the clouds covered the sun. First a small one, and then more and more came until the sky was full of clouds. Then came pouring rain. The children sat under trees in a foul mood.

“Oh, I hate rain,” whined Elva.

“Me too,” said Magni dejectedly.