His right leg was crippled, which made journeying none the easier; the stout staff he carried was but a poor substitute for a sound limb.
Despite his infirmity, he tramped the country far and wide. Just now, he was on his way across the chain of hills to the north of Hofsfjordur, known as the Dark Mountains.
He had never been in Hofsfjordur. All the other districts round he had visited many a time in his twenty years of vagabond life, but somehow he had always passed by this. If any asked him why, he might answer that it was because of the bad roads. Yet he was well used to roads that were no better.
However it might be, this time he was on his way. The day was drawing to a close, and he had still far to go. The night would be dark, and hopeless then to find his way; there was nothing for it but to find some sheltered spot where he could rest.
He was thoroughly tired, and his lameness was more marked than usual; his sound leg too was aching from its unfair share of the work. He rocked along uncertainly, like a machine on the verge of breakdown, or a windmill making its last rotations before a calm.
His heavy coat dragged like the wings of a wounded bird. It was a picture well in keeping with the landscape, the man with his long white beard, the tangled grey hair showing below a big soft hat of the indeterminate colour of age. From beneath his bushy brows showed the glimpse of an eye—he had but one—almost unearthly in its intelligence and penetrating glance. His whole appearance, with his beggar’s pouch and limping gait, presented an almost unreal effect, harmonizing to a striking degree with the surroundings. He seemed to be in his element in this waste tract, beneath the low-lying clouds that at times almost enveloped him.
He limped on, a monarch in the realm of mist and solitude.
But there was nothing of power in his thoughts. He simply felt at home here, and in no way disheartened at the prospect of a night in the open.
Again and again he hummed his fragment of a song. It was his way to make up such refrains as he walked, humming them hour after hour to while away the tedium of the road. Also, it was a form of expression, giving relief to his feelings and easing his mind.
At last, after innumerable repetitions of his melancholy chant, he fell silent. Not all at once, but stopping for a little, then taking it up and stopping again, with longer and longer pauses between. And his glance grew dull, his brow wrinkled and furrowed. Night was at hand; he stopped on a sudden as if to make a survey of his surroundings.