Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/287

266 They had to stay four days there, however, partly from stress of weather and partly because Faulkner was very unwell. On the 29th of July, on a bright cold morning, they started again northward through the wilderness towards Waterdale and the firths of the North Sea. Six cold days of rain and bitter wind among the "horrible black mountains of the waste," including an exploration of the great cave of Surts-hellir, impressed Morris's imagination with a sense of the terror of the land which never quite left him, and which reappears vividly in his descriptions of the mountain journeys in "The Glittering Plain" and "The Well at the World's End." Their route led over the Erne-water-heath, a dismal highland of bogs and pools on the watershed between the northern and western seas, where Grettir lived so long an outlaw; past Erne-water, where he slew Thorir Red-Beard, "a most mournful desolate-looking place with no signs of life as we rode up but for a swan that rose trumpeting from the lakeside"; and so down at last into Waterdale. The original plan had been to get further north and see Drángey, where Grettir lived strangely for the last three years of his life, and where he died at last in the great fight of the two against the eighteen. But time was running short, and this part of the journey had to be given up; they turned westwards, and crossed the ridges into Midfirthdale, where Bjarg, Grettir's birthplace, stands by its castellated rocks; then on to Thorodstead in Hrútafirth, and so round the end of the long sea-inlet and over the pass into Laxdale. On Sunday afternoon, the 6th of August, they rode into Herdholt.

"The little house that stands over so many stories of the old days is rather new and trim, but picturesque