Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/293

272 The spell, whereby the mist of fear Was melted, and your ears might hear Earth's voices as they are indeed. Well ye have helped me at my need.

It was not till a week later that the travellers reached Grettir's lair on the Fairwood-fells, "such a savage and dreadful place that it gave quite a new turn in my mind to the whole story, and transfigured Grettir into an awful and monstrous being, like one of the early giants of the world." On the 22nd of August they crossed White-water, and after a day's rest at Reykholt, where Snorri Sturluson lived and died, set forth for Thingvalla, the last goal of their pilgrimage.

"The wind dropped and a long strip of blue-green opened in the south-west, and widened and turned bluer and let the sun out. It is exciting to us to see the indigo-coloured peaks whose shapes we know rising up one after another over the dull heath: and soon we note the ragged screen of rocks before Ball-Jokul, and that other range that runs south from Skjaldbreid, and the whole tumbled sea of peaks that rise between us and the plain of Thingvellir.

"The heath bettered as we rode on, and we got to riding into little valleys now, boggy or sandy at bottom (oftenest the latter), but with the banks about them grown over with heath-berries, sweet grass and flowers, much as it was with our old encampment at Brunnar; at last these open out before us into a wider plain, and we can see Skjaldbreid clear to his feet, and the grey lava we journeyed over that other day, and the aforesaid toothed screen of mountains, ending in a gap through which show mountains a long way off, bright and intense blue under the now bright sunny sky; on the other side of this gap rises a lumpier range gradually drawing toward us, which is Armansfell: and