Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/298

ÆT. 38] other side of the river, and was all populous with ravens that kept crying out and croaking long after we were settled there."

The next day, "a most beautiful morning, warm and soft like a fine day of latter May in England," he visited the famous Hill of Laws. "A deep rift in the lava splits into two arms having a little island in the midst, bridged by a narrow space on which two men could barely stand abreast. When you are in the island it widens and slopes upward higher and higher, till at last, where the two arms of the rift meet, there is a considerable cliff above the dark dreadful-looking rift and its cold waters: a dozen yards from this is a little mound rising from the surface of the island, which, if the Hill of Laws is the heart of Iceland, is the heart of the Hill of Laws, for here stood the Speaker at Law, and every year gave forth the law: the whole island is not a large church for the ceremony; it might hold some five hundred men close-packed; but surely 'tis one of the most dramatic spots in all Iceland, and Grim Goatshoe, who picked it out for the seat of the Althing (he had a penny for his pains from every householder of Iceland), must have been a man of poetic insight. It is a good deal raised above the level of the Valley of Axewater; the rift all round it is deep and wide, I should say sixteen feet wide at the narrowest, where you can see, many, many feet below, the rocks all blue and purple through the clearest water in the world; this is the place that they call Flosi's Leap; for the tradition (not the Njala Saga) says that Flosi the Burner leapt across it to join his men who were drawn up outside the Berg: and they say he was in all his arms when he leapt. The Hill of Laws is all covered with sweet deep grass, and the heath-berries grow all down the sides of its rift. As you stand here