closes up the valley with its jagged outlying teeth was right before us: often the wall would be cleft, and you would see a horrible winding street, with stupendous straight rocks for houses on either side: the bottom of the cleft quite level, but with a white glacier stream running out of it, and the whole blocked up at the end by the straight line of the master-mountain. Jón told us how he had gone down this valley in the winter with the snow covering either hillside, and the moon at its brightest; of sheep-gatherings he had been at, where every individual sheep has to be carried on horseback over the fords; of expeditions he had made for the fun of the thing up into the pathless wastes about here; and finally, as we crossed one of the streams that run into Markfleet, he told us the timely and cheerful story of how, riding in the autumntide with a party down this valley, they coming to this stream concluded it to be fordless, but nevertheless one of the rashest cried out that he would not be stopped, dashed into the water, where his horse was immediately swept off his legs down stream, and the last they saw of the man was him clutching with both arms round the horse's neck, in which position the bodies of both horse and man were found thrown ashore lower down."
On the way back to Lithend they passed a stead where "the bonder, who was very deep in old lore, was flatteringly anxious to see me. He was a grave, black-bearded, intelligent-looking carle of about fifty, and soon he got discussing with Magnússon and Jón minute probabilities of time and place in the Njala, pretty much as if the thing had happened twenty years ago: from that he got to lamenting the wasteful cutting of the woods in that country-side: as we departed I made a bad shot at the saddle trying to mount, more
