I felt glad to be leaving Faroe shortly after my sister Christianna got married. Unlike Bedda with her stern demeanour, she was the one with whom I always felt the greatest kinship. Throughout our years together, it was clear there were similar stirrings of adventure in her soul. We would speak to each other about a life among city streets, exploring alleyways and thoroughfares, shops and stores, coming to know them in a similar manner to how our local fishermen became aware of the channels and currents around our own islands, or the shepherds in these parts were familiar with the streams and summits found within our cramped and narrow shores. ''How wonderful it would be to go to Paris or London,'' she might say. ''It would be great to discover what its streets were like.'' And then she would pause, as if testing out the reality of these words on her tongue. ''What people we could meet there! What places we could come across!'' And then she goes and chooses He.

in for a husband, a quiet, shy and pious fisherman from a small stretch of land near Sørvágur, the edge of these islands, the far periphery. I recall asking her why she had chosen that place, the coldest in the archipelago with snow and frost for more days than anywhere else in the vicinity. She smiled once and declared, ''Perhaps he and I can bring a little warmth to it.'' I blushed as only a boy barely into his teens can. And then I asked why she had picked him, instead of travelling to far locations as she and I had planned to do for years. She gave me one of the most intense looks I had ever seen on her face, her words coming slowly, as if there was a weight and a burden attached to each one. ''Perhaps it''s more important to spend your life exploring yourself rather than travelling to other places. Perhaps journeying to other countries only gets in the way of all that.

'' I shook my head. ''Surely you can do both.'' ''I''m not sure you can,'' she said. ''To really discover yourself you need stillness and calm. If you''re travelling, you have to plan your movements before you undertake them, walk along unfamiliar places, deal with the strange situations you come across. You can''t do both - explore strange cities and find out about yourself. The two can''t be done together.'' I said nothing, aware that, in my father''s view at least, travel extended the reach of a man''s soul.

Even the possibility of it occurring was having that effect on me. During the last few months in which I lived in Havn, I began to become aware of how on these dark, still nights that occurred in Faroe, the Milky Way seeped into my spirit; how in the chill of winter, the huge expanse of the Northern Lights became part of my essence, their arrival extending the reach of my imagination over sea and sky, as if I were the one that was dancing miles above the land. Even the dizzy heights of cliffs left me reeling with the power and wonder of the natural world of these islands. It was as if the multitude of seabirds that clustered there had entered me - the sweep of gulls and gannets, the shades and colours of puffin, even the black and white plumage of guillemots as they flapped towards the shore. There was something magical within me, a power that had been granted by the possibility of leaving home. It brought me, day after day, down to the eastern harbour, spending each dry and windless hour there sketching the seabirds that could be seen, the fish that boats carried to shore. With my pencil, I transformed them, giving them human expressions, chiselling jawlines, sketching eyes, providing arms and legs where they once possessed wings or fins. I remember my father looking at me with amazement when he saw these sketches, amazed at what his son had fashioned on a simple sheet of paper.

''I wonder if it''s wise to let you go away from here. Who knows where you might end up?''''Atlantis?'' I muttered. ''Hy-Brasil? Avalon? St Kilda?'' ''Oh, further even than that. The moon or the planets?'' He grinned.