When the boat was loaded and everything else was in order for the journey, Ingolf concluded his preparations with a great sacrificial feast, at which he made abundant offerings to the gods, in order that they should grant him and his fellow-travellers good fortune and happiness on the voyage. Nevertheless, the days went by without the commencement of the hoped-for sailing weather.
These days of waiting were hard for Leif to bear. He became morose. Any kind of waiting was the worst thing Leif knew. It made his hasty and adventurous spirit full of discontent. He cursed the vessel, called it a wretched old woman's bath, and invented even worse names for it.
Ingolf took the matter quietly. Certainly he had already made his offerings to the gods, and copiously. But it was a special voyage they were to make—the gods were to protect them, and on wide and strange ways. He therefore brought fresh offerings, and also secretly gave Odin and Njord private gifts, besides vowing yet greater ones if they would prosper his journey there and back and on the way. This expedient helped. There came a day with splendid sailing weather—a sunshiny day full of light and warm wind. Before midday all was ready—the animals brought on board, the crew in their places (Ingolf and Leif took only the smallest possible crew with them), and the vessel cleared for sailing. Under a heavily bellying sail it glided out between the skerries. Hallveig and Helga stood on the poop by their husbands and watched the shores glide past on either side. Hallveig was quiet in mind, and felt only glad at the fine day and the journey. Sea and land were all the same to her, if only she had Ingolf. Here they were sailing out to find a new land, to seek a new home. She was ready with all her soul to remain fixed in the spot on the earth which Ingolf might choose for them, no matter where it might be.
But with Helga it was otherwise. She was calm and quiet enough, but her calm was, as so often on other occasions, only outward. The strong scent of the pines from the spruce- and fir-clad islands they were sailing by, roused a profound longing in her soul. This was the place where she was at home. There in the house down there by the shore, which seen from the fjord here looked so strange. There seemed to be a sob in Helga's soul. She, the faithful, had only one home. She did not at all wish to turn or to remain behind, for she stood here by Leif's side. But she felt as though her heart were being split asunder and her soul divided. For this place which she now left, to return to it next spring only for a time, had shared with her happiness and solitude. There was hardly a stone in the house which she had not patted with her hand and made her confidant in joy or sorrow. She was bound to the house and the surroundings of her childhood with ties which could not be loosed or cut asunder. She knew with certainty that she would always feel strange and homeless outside Dalsfjord. She reproached herself for this feeling—for she had Leif—but she could not overcome it. All she could do was to vow to herself never to betray it. Thus Helga took a secret with the scent of the pine trees from the islands.
II
Ingolf and Leif sailed by the guidance of the sun and the stars, and steered directly westward. For the first two days and nights a steady east wind filled the square sail and carried them steadily forwards. There were high spirits and much excited expectation on board. Indeed, it seemed as though the wind had been sent by Odin with the sole purpose of furthering their journey. But just as they had settled down in confidence that they were under the god's special protection the weather began to shift and change. Now it seemed, for the most part, as if one or another of the divinities had set himself fiercely against them, or as if Odin had suddenly become busy elsewhere.
The wind took the wrong direction, and seemed uninterruptedly occupied in settling private accounts with the towering waves of the sea. In the course of two days and nights it had gone several times round the horizon and varied through all degrees of strength from a moderate calm to what Vikings would mildly call a storm. And then all of a sudden it disappeared. They looked longingly for it—east, west, south, and north—for though they had cursed its vagaries heartily enough, it was still preferable to a dead calm. But it was absent, and remained absent. Unreliable as it had always been, it had gone off to other regions, and left them alone here in the midst of the sea. There lay the vessel, pitching lazily, and making no way at all. Where they were no one knew, and there was nothing to show them. Whither the wind had carried them, while it was still with them and blew alternately from all points of the compass, they could not find out. The sun and stars had only rarely been visible. The spirits of all on board were rapidly sinking. Matters were not improved when, after several days and nights of calm, there came gliding a cunning, silent bank of fog and swallowed them up, blotted them out from the eyes of heaven, swept all sight of sea and sky out of the world, and left the vessel lying, rocking lonelily, forgotten by all good powers on a strange sea.
There they lay while the days came and went—grey days which could only make marks on Ingolf's time-stick. For even though Ingolf was displeased enough with these days he kept a steady count of them, marked each of them off on his stick with the little notch that was their due, and, for the rest, execrated them in silence.