Greenland, and the sunny lands which they said lay even beyond, across the
all but unknown ocean. He would go up the Baltic to the Jomsburg Vikings,
and fight against Lett and Esthonian heathen, and pierce inland, perhaps,
through Puleyn and the bison forests, to the land from whence came the
magic swords and the old Persian coins which he had seen so often in the
halls of his forefathers. No; he would go South, to the land of sun and
wine; and see the magicians of Cordova and Seville; and beard Mussulman
hounds worshipping their Mahomets; and perhaps bring home an Emir's
daughter,--

"With more gay gold about her middle,
Than would buy half Northumberlee."

Or he would go up the Straits, and on to Constantinople and the great
Kaiser of the Greeks, and join the Varanger Guard, and perhaps, like
Harold Hardraade in his own days, after being cast to the lion for
carrying off a fair Greek lady, tear out the monster's tongue with his own
hands, and show the Easterns what a Viking's son could do. And as he
dreamed of the infinite world and its infinite wonders, the enchanters he
might meet, the jewels he might find, the adventures be might essay, he
held that he must succeed in all, with hope and wit and a strong arm; and
forgot altogether that, mixed up with the cosmogony of an infinite flat
plain called the Earth, there was joined also the belief in a flat roof
above called Heaven, on which (seen at times in visions through clouds and
stars) sat saints, angels, and archangels, forevermore harping on their
golden harps, and knowing neither vanity nor vexation of spirit, lust nor
pride, murder nor war;--and underneath a floor, the name whereof was Hell;
the mouths whereof (as all men knew) might be seen on Hecla and Aetna and
Stromboli; and the fiends heard within, tormenting, amid fire, and smoke,
and clanking chains, the souls of the eternally lost.