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one end of the house where the women endlessly wove long strips of wadmal, the narrow woollen cloth which serves the Icelanders as everything from clothing to saddle blankets and the raw material for ships' sails when the strips are sewn side by side.
    Thorgunna also pulled her weight — which was considerable — in the outside work, particularly when it came to haymaking. This is the crucial time in the Icelandic farming year, when the grass must be cut and turned and gathered and stacked for winter fodder for the animals, who will shortly be brought back from the outlying pastures where they have been spending the summer. My mother even had the carpenter make her own hay rake. It was longer, heavier and wider than most, and she would not let anyone else touch it.
    Then came the day - it was late in heyannir, the haymaking season which occurs at the end of August in the second year of Thorgunna's stay — which the Frodriver people will never forget. The day was ideal for drying - hot with a light breeze. Thorodd mobilised the entire household, except for a few herders who were away looking after the sheep and cattle in the high pasture, to be out in the home meadow turning the hay. They were widely scattered, when just before noon the sky began to cloud over rapidly. It was a sinister sort of cloud — dark and ominous and heavy with rain. This cloud spread rapidly from the north-east and people began to glance up at it nervously, hoping that it would hold off and not spoil the haymaking. The cloud deepened and darkened until it was almost like night, and it was obvious that there would soon be a torrential downpour. Thorodd instructed the haymakers to stack their sections of hay to protect them from the rain, and was puzzled when Thorgunna ignored him. She seemed to be in a trance.
    Then the rain started to pelt down and there was little point in staying outside, so Thorodd called in the workers for their midday break, to eat coarse bread and cheese in the main house. But Thorgunna again ignored Thorodd's instructions, nor did she pay any attention to the other workers as they trudged past her and back toward the farm. She kept on working, turning the hay with the wide slow powerful sweeps of her special rake. Thorodd called again, but it was as if Thorgunna was deaf. She kept working even as the rainstorm swept in, and everyone ran for shelter. It was a most unusual rainstorm. It fell on Frodriver, and only on Frodriver. All the other farms escaped the downpour and their hay was saved. But the Skattkaupandi farm was saturated. That in itself is not so strange. Any farmer has seen the same phenomenon when a summer cloudburst releases a torrent of rain which seems to drop vertically and strike just one small area. Then suddenly the rain ceases, the sun comes out and the ground begins to steam with the heat. But what was startling about the rainstorm at Frodriver was that it was not rain which fell from the cloud, but blood.
    I know that sounds absurd. Yet it is no more fantastic than the contention that I have heard from apparently wise and learned men that fire and brimstone will pour from the sky in the great apocalypse. Certainly the people of Frodriver and the locality swear that the drops which hurtled from the sky were not rain, but dark red blood. It stained red the cut hay, it left pools of blood in the dips and hollows, and it drenched Thorgunna in blood. When she returned to the farmhouse, still as if in a daze and not saying a word, her clothes were saturated. When the garments were squeezed, blood ran out of them.
    Thorodd asked her what was meant by the thunderstorm. Was it an omen? If so, of what? Thorgunna was slow in recovering from her confused state and did not reply. It seemed to Thorodd that she had been absent from her physical body and was not yet fully returned to it, and that something otherworldly was involved. His opinion was confirmed when the entire haymaking team went back into the field. The