Olaf, a Northman, breaks into a grave mound to take a necklace from the dead man called the Wanderer and is set on a road that carries him to Byzantium — to the Empress Irene, the Varangian guard, and a blinding. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen and helped raise the Union Jack over the Transvaal; here he crosses his Norse register with his Egyptian one, and the Byzantine court is the coldest thing in it. Fifty-four plates of northern sea light and shipwreck, from Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg to Edvard Munch, carry the cold of the Northmen's world across the centuries into Byzantium.
