Then they went further on their way right across a deep dark valley.  In the rocky walls above him he saw a row of four-cornered white doors, from which a sort of glimmer, as from the northern lights, shot downwards through the darkness.  This valley stretched in a north-eastwardly direction right under Finmark, she said, and inside the white doors dwelt the old Finn Kings who had perished on the sea.  Then she went and opened the nearest of these doors—­here, down in the salt ocean, was the last of the kings, who had capsized in the very breeze that he himself had conjured forth, but could not afterwards quell.  There, on a block of stone, sat a wrinkled yellow Finn with running eyes and a polished dark-red crown.  His large head rocked backwards and forwards on his withered neck, as if it were in the swirl of an ocean current.  Beside him, on the same block, sat a still more shrivelled and yellow little woman, who also had a crown on, and her garments were covered with all sorts of coloured stones; she was stirring up a brew with a stick.  If she only had fire beneath it, the girl told Eilert, she and her husband would very soon have dominion again over the salt sea, for the thing she was stirring about was magic stuff.

In the middle of a plain, which opened right before them at a turn of the road, stood a few houses together like a little town, and, a little further on, Eilert saw a church turned upside down, looking, with its long pointed tower, as if it were mirrored in the water.  The girl explained to him that her father dwelt in these houses, and the church was one of the seven that stood in his realm, which extended all over Helgoland and Finmark.  No service was held in them yet, but it would be held when the drowned bishop, who sat outside in a brown study, could only hit upon the name of the Lord that was to be served, and then all the Draugs would go to church.  The bishop, she said, had been sitting and pondering the matter over these eight hundred years, so he would no doubt very soon get to the bottom of it.  A hundred years ago the bishop had advised them to send up one of the Draugs to Roedoe church to find out all about it; but every time the word he wanted was mentioned he couldn’t catch the sound of it.  In the mountain “Kunnan” King Olaf had hung a church-bell of pure gold, and it is guarded by the first priest who ever came to Nordland, who stands there in a white chasuble.

On the day the priest rings the bell, Kunnan will become a big stone church, to which all Nordland, both above and below the sea, will resort.  But time flies, and therefore all who come down here below are asked by the bishop if they can tell him that name.

At this Eilert felt very queer indeed, and he felt queerer still when he began reflecting and found, to his horror, that he also had forgotten that name.

While he stood there in thought, the girl looked at him so anxiously.  It was almost as if she wanted to help him to find it and couldn’t, and with that she all at once grew deadly pale.