Get in to the light. 
  Yea, has he mouthed ye?...  What men send ye here? 
  Who are ye?  Whence come ye?  What do ye seek? 
  I think no mother ever suckled you: 
  You must have dragged your roots up in waste places
  One foot at once, or heaved a shoulder up—­

      BIARTEY (interrupting him)
  Out of the bosoms of cairns and standing stones. 
  I am Biartey:  she is Jofrid:  she is Gudfinn: 
  We are lone women known to no man now. 
  We are not sent:  we come.

                        GUNNAR
  Well, you come. 
  You appear by night, rising under my eyes
  Like marshy breath or shadows on the wall;
  Yet the hound scented you like any evil
  That feels upon the night for a way out. 
  And do you, then, indeed wend alone? 
  Came you from the West or the sky-covering North
  Yet saw no thin steel moving in the dark?

                        BIARTEY
  Not West, not North:  we slept upon the East,
  Arising in the East where no men dwell. 
  We have abided in the mountain places,
  Chanted our woes among the black rocks crouching.

  (GUDFINN joins her in a sing-song utterance.)
  From the East, from the East we drove and the wind waved us,
  Over the heaths, over the barren ashes. 
  We are old, our eyes are old, and the light hurts us,
  We have skins on our eyes that part alone to the star-light. 
  We stumble about the night, the rocks tremble
  Beneath our trembling feet; black sky thickens,
  Breaks into clots, and lets the moon upon us.

  (JOFRID joins her voice to the voices of the other two.)
  Far from the men who fear us, men who stone us,
  Hiding, hiding, flying whene’er they slumber,
  High on the crags we pause, over the moon-gulfs;
  Black clouds fall and leave us up in the moon-depths
  Where wind flaps our hair and cloaks like fin-webs,
  Ay, and our sleeves that toss with our arms and the cadence
  Of quavering crying among the threatening echoes. 
  Then we spread our cloaks and leap down the rock-stairs,
  Sweeping the heaths with our skirts, greying the dew-bloom,
  Until we feel a pool on the wide dew stretches
  Stilled by the moon or ruffling like breast-feathers,
  And, with grey sleeves cheating the sleepy herons,
  Squat among them, pillow us there and sleep. 
  But in the harder wastes we stand upright,
  Like splintered rain-worn boulders set to the wind
  In old confederacy, and rest and sleep.

  (HALLGERD’S women are huddled together and clasping each other.)

                        ODDNY
  What can these women be who sleep like horses,
  Standing up in the darkness?  What will they do?

                        GUNNAR
  Ye wail like ravens and have no human thoughts. 
  What do ye seek?  What will ye here with us?