This story so influenced Floki Vilgerdarson, a famous old Viking, that he resolved at once to settle in the new country. Floki, trusting to the flight of ravens, took three of these sable birds of omen as his pilots. When a little beyond the Faroe Islands, he liberated one bird which immediately returned to the land. Some days later a second was set free, whereupon it arose, circled about the ship and returned to its cage. Later the third was liberated. This bird flew to the northwest, and piloted Floki to Iceland. On entering a great bay, bounded on the right by a lofty mountain and on the left by a rugged promontory, Faxa, one of his companions, called the attention of Floki to the fact that such prominent physical features must mark a land of vast expansion and enormous riches. So flattered was Floki that the bay was immediately christened _Faxafjörðr_, its present name. A colony was founded on a small inlet which in honor of their feathered pilot was named _Hrafnarfjörðr_, “Raven’s fiord.” Proper precaution was not taken for the severe winter that followed, and during the second year the few survivors returned to Faroe in disgust and gave to this inhospitable land the chilly name of _Iceland_. Among the first of the high-born Jarls of Norway to leave his native land was Ingölfr Arnarson, accompanied by his foster brother, Hjörleifr. Many of his friends had gone to ravage France, others went to England, where Alfred was beginning his eventful reign and still others remained in Norway to await the reports from Ingölfr in Iceland. This was in 874, and recalling accounts of Gardar, they set sail with high hopes. Ingölfr took with him the pillars of the high seat of his ancestral hall and when he came in sight of the icy domes of the _Öraefa Jökull_ he cast the pillars into the sea and vowed that upon whatever coast they drifted, there would be found his colony. How many a traveller in modern days has sailed those same waters with the story of Ingölfr fresh in mind and gazed up to these towering cliffs, crowned with pristine ice and decorated with countless waterfalls glittering in the Arctic sun! A violent storm arose which separated him from his sacred relics and forced him to land upon a long, steep headland just under the _Öraefa_. To this day the promontory bears the name of _Ingölfshöfði_. A still bolder headland about seventy miles to the west bears the name of his kinsman, _Hjörleifshfði_. Hjörleifr was not only a sea-rover, a Viking, but he disdained to worship the gods of his race. He set his Irish slaves to tilling the land. They slew him and fled to the adjacent islands, since called _Vestmannaeyjar_, or the “Westmen Isles,” for the Irish were then known as the Westmen.