The 800 years are passed. The writer stands at eventide alone upon the _Lögberg_ and views with enchanted eye this perfect painting of peace let down from heaven. Mammoth and angular masses, their roughness softened with thyme and forget-me-nots, surround the age-old chasms and live anew in those Nile-green depths. Peaceful it is beyond the power of description. Here the sturdy Viking, wealthy with the spoils of Europe, worked out a constitution, founded a republic, sloughed off the skin of paganism, adopted on the first ballot the Christ-law and crystallized a civilization centuries since. Here in the old and stirring days great minds held sway. What sturdy men they were, mighty in feats of arms, resourceful, inventive, poetic, pregnant with the germs of thought that in their latter day development produced a scholastic, peaceful, Christian nation! What wondrous deeds they wrought, what grand old epics they enacted, let their Sagamen relate.
Beautiful Arctic flowers crown the _Lögberg_. The plover whistles on the heather and the whimbrel calls as in days of yore. Around this primitive parliament flow the emerald waters in varied shades of prismic green like polished malachite, long since unpolluted with broken-backed criminals.
I fired my revolver into the green-bedded chasm of the _Flosigjá_ to awaken the echoes. Their voices betokened peace. The angry snarl of the bloodthirsty mob, the clash of bill on yielding armor, the wail of drowning women no longer reverberated from chasm to cliff. Echo had but one message, _Peace_.
[Illustration: _Foot of the Öxerá in Almannagjá._
_Lögberg, Mount of Laws, between the Rifts. Ármannsfell in the Distance._]
Peace to the generations past, whose warriors have long since mouldered in yonder heath! Solemnly, softly, silently the echo fades upon _Thingvellir’s_ plain. So say I.—Peace to the mighty dead! Peace to the little nation now toiling for existence upon this fire-blistered island! Peace, I say, to those Plutonic forces that have wrought far greater havoc and misery in this Arctic realm than all the bloody passions of its first born sons!
“Where the cauldron of the North Spouts his boiling waters forth, From the caverns far beneath, Where they ever lie and seethe, And with steam, and hiss, and boom, Send a tremor through the gloom, Till, above, the solid ground Vibrates with a dull rebound,— In that place I stood and saw Things that filled my soul with awe.”