(Ljot stands motionless looking out over the "hraun.")
Einar (coming from the tent). They are asleep in there already. Won't you put the shawl around your shoulders?
Ljot. I am not cold.
Einar. Then I'll spread it over one of the rocks for you to sit on. They are wet with dew. (Spreads it over the stone.) There! What did you have in mind when you stood there looking out over the hraun?
Ljot. I was thinking of an old tale Jakobina once told me. It was about a young girl. She went out on the hraun with bare feet to meet her sweetheart, and wherever she stepped the moss grew under her foot.
Einar. That's a pretty story. I can tell you one too, if you care to hear it. It might help to quiet you a little.
Ljot (takes his hand). You are so good.
Einar (sits down; relates). In olden times, they say, there was an underground stream that ran straight through the country from south to north and was meant as a sign of truce between land and sea. It happened that a cross-eyed, ill-natured shark was trying to tempt a young whale to swim that stream from end to end. The whale's name was Spray-tail. He was the handsomest of all the young whales and could shoot three jets of water at once. The shark boasted that he had swum through the stream himself, but of course it was only real fishes that could do it. Spray-tail felt stung on behalf of his kin, and as the shark had told him that there were openings here and there in the roof of this underground way, he made up his mind to try his luck, trusting that he could hold his breath from one opening to another. But it fell out otherwise. Spray-tail never came back. The last ever heard of him was that some swans, in their flight over the hills, had seen a jet of blood spurting out of the ground.
The whales were in a rage and, as they thought in their grief that the land had broken truce, they goaded the sea to wreak vengeance upon it. Are you listening?
(Ljot nods her head.)