Tales of the Peculiar - The Man Who Bottled the Sun

Начало книги

You may have heard that there are regions in the far north where the sun doesn’t rise at all in winter, while in summer it shines constantly, even at midnight.

It wasn’t always so.

There was a time when Iceland got as much sunshine in the winter as Spain. Then a peculiar man named Jón Jónsson came along and changed everything.

Jón’s parents knew he was special from an early age. When he was seven he caught a flu that made him want to sleep all day, but there were no curtains on the windows and his room was filled with sunlight. His mother laid him in bed and went out to fetch the shutters, which were made of wood and normally used only during winter storms. When she returned with them under her arm, the room was dark. She thought she was losing her mind: she could see the sun glinting against the window glass, but its rays stopped there; the room itself was mired in a moonless night’s gloom. But there was a glow beneath her sleeping son’s sheets, and peeling them back she found light leaking out between the fingers of Jón’s closed hand.

Читать дальше →