The two beds were placed end to end on one side of the room. Each was five feet long and not over two and a half in width. How these six-foot men can sleep in any comfort in five-foot beds is a mystery. The mattress is a well stuffed feather bed, the coverlet is of eider down. The down is stuffed into a tick like a pillow and like a pillow it has a white case. One virtually sleeps between two feather beds. In the nightly struggles to kick the foot board out of my short bed, the overgrown pillow, used as a blanket, often fell to the floor and sometimes as a last resort to straighten out, I followed the coverlet to the floor, used it for a mattress and with a steamer rug slept in peace. Nine in the morning found us at breakfast. An hour later, having paid our host his modest reckoning, with handshaking all round and a hearty _góðr á daginn_, pronounced as though spelled _go-an-dine_, meaning literally “good to the day,” an ancient Scandinavian salutation and universal in Iceland for centuries, we started to _Thingvellir_. After riding for half an hour over the barren plain thickly studded with fragments of the ancient basalt and with eyes steadfastly fixed upon the beauties of the lake, we came to the brink of a mighty chasm. Below our feet is the plain of _Thingvellir_, the Mecca of Iceland, the seat of the ancient parliament, the resultant of the combined freakishness of earthquake and volcanic forces. It is a remarkable geological formation. The sunken plain is nearly ten miles long and five miles broad. We stand on the brink of the _Almannagjá_, All-Men’s-Rift, so named because in ancient days when the nobles and law-makers were assembled in the plain below, the common people met upon the heights along the brink of this chasm for a great national holiday of about two weeks. To our right, south-west, the sunken valley is filled with the waters of the lake. To the left, northeast, rises the abrupt wall of _Ármannsfell_, a lofty mountain of trap. To the south-east, five miles away and extending from the far side of the lake to _Ármannsfell_ is the _Hrafnagjá_, Ravens-Rift. This rift is parallel with the one upon whose brink we are now standing. The sunken plain varies in the depth of its depression from twenty-five feet at the northeast to over a hundred feet at the south-west, below the level of the surrounding moorland. The plain itself is rent, rifted and shattered into thousands of fragments as if hot water had been dashed against a plate glass window on a frosty morning. Hundreds of chasms intersect each other in the sunken plain in a huge network. They go deep down to the bed of the lake and the lake follows them up under the lava and the water glimmers at the bottom of these chasms.