It is midnight, local time. The sun has been in his ocean bath for thirty minutes and in an equal length of time he will emerge near by the locality of his plunge. It is an entrancing scene and recalls the Twilight of the Gods. The heavens are overcast with a rose-flesh hue of varying tones. No stars dot the bending dome, no moon skirts the far horizon. The _Faxa_ is like a molten sea of precious metal and across it roll billows of purple light which striking the base of _Keilir_, surge to its pointed summit in waves of lighter hue to break in confusion on the distant volcanoes. _Esja_ catches the color of the sky, its dripping parapet glistens as at noon and its ice mantle is transformed into rosy quartz. The crowning glory of the moment is _Snaefells_. Behind it is the sun. A broad streamer rises vertically to the zenith from behind the mountain. It splits the warmer shades with a band of saffron. It spreads outward like an opening fan. _Snaefells_ is the jewel in the end of the fan handle. The fan unfolds until a full quadrant of the heavens have turned to gold with radiating streaks of crimson. The ice-cap has become a ruby and _Esja_ a fiery opal. Kaleidoscopic is the change. Like the Borealis the colors come and go, the mists open and close and the tints deepen. _Esja_ lives doubly in the bosom of the fiord within whose shadow the fishing fleet rock gently at their moorings. Even the ribbons of mist are imaged in the sea and in those vast depths drift softly like the real ones of the upper air. The cone of _Keilir_ brightens, the slumbering tints burst into fire, the fire resolves itself into white light. The sun has risen from its midnight bath, morning has come and I seek the hotel conscious that neither pen nor brush can catch the true values of this great harmony of colors, that it is impossible to set it to meter or spread it upon the canvas. But it lives indelibly in the soul of the poet, the painter and the musician. Yes it is music, a great symphony,— “It is passion that left the ground To loose itself in the sky.” CHAPTER VII THINGVELLIR “Land of lost gods and godlike men, art thou! Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow, Proclaim thee Nature’s varied favorite now.” —_Byron._