So up and up they journeyed, and ever as they went
    About the cold-slaked forges, o’er many a cloud-swept bent,
    Betwixt the walls of blackness, by shores of the fishless meres,
    And the fathomless desert waters, did Regin cast his fears,
    And wrap him in desire; and all alone he seemed
    As a God to his heirship wending, and forgotten and undreamed
    Was all the tale of Sigurd, and the folk he had toiled among,
    And the Volsungs, Odin’s children, and the men-folk fair and young.

    So on they ride to the westward; and huge were the mountains grown
    And the floor of heaven was mingled with that tossing world of stone: 
    And they rode till the noon was forgotten and the sun was waxen low,
    And they tarried not, though he perished, and the world grew dark
      below. 
    Then they rode a mighty desert, a glimmering place and wide,
    And into a narrow pass high-walled on either side
    By the blackness of the mountains, and barred aback and in face
    By the empty night of the shadow; a windless silent place: 
    But the white moon shone o’erhead mid the small sharp stars and pale,
    And each as a man alone they rode on the highway of bale.

    So ever they wended upward, and the midnight hour was o’er,
    And the stars grew pale and paler, and failed from the heaven’s floor,
    And the moon was a long while dead, but where was the promise of day? 
    No change came over the darkness, no streak of the dawning grey;
    No sound of the wind’s uprising adown the night there ran: 
    It was blind as the Gaping Gulf ere the first of the worlds began.

    Then athwart and athwart rode Sigurd and sought the walls of the pass,
    But found no wall before him; and the road rang hard as brass
    Beneath the hoofs of Greyfell, as up and up he trod: 
    —­Was it the daylight of Hell, or the night of the doorway of God?

    But lo, at the last a glimmer, and a light from the west there came,
    And another and another, like points of far-off flame;
    And they grew and brightened and gathered; and whiles together they ran
    Like the moon wake over the waters; and whiles they were scant and wan,
    Some greater and some lesser, like the boats of fishers laid
    About the sea of midnight; and a dusky dawn they made,
    A faint and glimmering twilight:  So Sigurd strains his eyes,
    And he sees how a land deserted all round about him lies
    More changeless than mid-ocean, as fruitless as its floor: 
    Then the heart leaps up within him, for he knows that his journey
      is o’er. 
    And there he draweth bridle on the first of the Glittering Heath: 
    And the Wrath is waxen merry and sings in the golden sheath
    As he leaps adown from Greyfell, and stands upon his feet,
    And wends his ways through the twilight the Foe of the Gods to meet.