through the gloomy shaft at the sky overhead, which floated there
blazing with light, and then you suddenly looked down again, so that
everything was quite dark. And in the darkness floated blue and yellow
rings of color, where formerly there had been nothing but dustbins and
privies. This dizzy flux of colors before the eyes was the journey far
out to the land of happiness, in search of all the things that cannot be
told. "I can see something myself, and I know quite well what it is, but
I'm just not going to tell," they murmured, blinking mysteriously up
into the blue.

However, one could have too much of a good thing.... But the round
grating under the timbers yonder, where Hanne's father drowned himself,
was a thing one never grew weary of. The depths were forever bubbling
upward, filling the little children with a secret horror; and the half-
grown girls would stand a-straddle over the grating, shuddering at the
cold breath that came murmuring up from below. The grating was sure
enough the way down to hell, and if you gazed long enough you could see
the faintest glimmer of the inky stream that was flowing down below.
Every moment it sent its putrid breath up into your face; that was the
Devil, who sat panting down there in a corner. If you turned your eyes
away from the depths the twilight of the well had turned to brightest
day, so you could make the world light or dark just as you wished.

A few children always lay there, on all fours, gazing down with anxious
faces; and all summer through, directly over the grating, hung a cloud
of midges, swaying in the breath of the depths. They would rise to a
certain height, then suddenly fall, and rise again, just like a
juggler's balls. Sometimes the breathing from below sucked the whole
swarm right down, but it rose up again, veering hither and thither like
a dancing wraith in the draught from the tunnel-like entry. The little