Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  It’s great to get out into nature once in a while, said the poet Worm Serpent, drawing in a deep breath which ended in a hacking cough; he lit his pipe and breathed easier, his lightweight dustjacket fluttering in the wind. He pulled his fur hat down to his bushy eyebrows so all the fur ran together, it was like the poet’s eyebrows had spread over his whole head … outsider, dwarf, poet, I thought to myself. Ah, yes, it’s good to be here, Worm, said The Regular, people are always talking about going out to nature when you really go into nature, you go out of the house into nature, you cannot go out of the house out to nature, that’s just confusing, one goes out of the city, out of the car into nature … ah, here are the perfect conditions for writing my essay on symbolism, Belgian symbolism, not any old symbolism, and Icelandic symbolism if anything exists that can be called Icelandic symbolism, and Einar Jónsson, sculptor and symbolist, here I finally have peace because there is no agriculture to please the State, here you can have an institute like at Tvísker… here a man can get inspiration from a rock … you’ll see! Worm! you! lads! out from the rock my title rolls along like a meteor down the landslides:

  EINAR

  JÓNSSON

  HIS SCULPTURES

  & BELGIAN SYMBOLISM

  INC. J. DELVILLE & HIS OCCULT KIN

  & MEANINGS & INFLUENCE OF LES TRÉSORS

  ON EINAR JÓNSSON ESPECIALLY ALDA ALDANNA

  (THE WAVE OF THE AGES) ALSO WHY NO-ONE HAS DUG

  INTO THIS OR KNOWS ABOUT THESE FOUNDATIONAL CONNECTIONS

  It strikes me as peculiar, said Worm, to use eighteenth-century style in the title of an article about nineteenth-century material, but The Regular got angry and said: You are speaking out against Móskriður! And he curled up into a ball like a slug and rolled down the slope at Hálsasker, then jumped up the way a rolled-up spring mattress does when released; landing on his feet, he said:

  EINAR JÓNSSON

  &

  SATAN’S TREASURE

  Satisfied? Is that really better? The Regular asked Worm Serpent. Much better, said Worm, nice and simple …We need simplicity, always, to suit simple souls, The Regular said, rather than letting content and style go hand in hand, you’re probably right, dear Worm, the baroque dazzles me, this essay concerns sculptors, and the style is supposed to be chiseled, no blockiness, no ricketiness, that’s cubism, what happened to the cubists in literature? … maybe a kind of diamond structure, because triangles and pyramids relate to symbolism and all the mysteries, some higher eye I’ve never comprehended, yes, the all-seeing eye, the text will be in the style of Einar Jónsson’s sculptures, the subject, thank you Short Worm.

  You get so sleepy, deeply tired inside your head, being constantly immersed in beauty, The Regular said, the Öræfings are indeed as calm and perfect as Eggert & Bjarni say, they live in such a beautiful environment, ugliness makes men aggressive, discourteous, arrogant and repulsive and insipid, sharp, witty, sarcastic; the sources in your trunk suggest that there’s no equivalent good weather as in Svínafell, even though there’s nowhere in the world where there are dwellings closer to the glacier than there, that provides Svínafell with its beautiful weather, said Kiddi, contributing to the debate and then falling silent, he’s such an Öræfing that he can fall asleep in mid-sentence when he is talking to someone and finish that sentence sometime later in the day. When he was little, a tractor blew off a slope and over the house, its hood was later found far out on the sand, crumpled together like a caramel paper. Violent gusts came down the mountain, said The Regular. One time, Kiddi was on the way out to the duckhouse when he heard a great din, and saw the forest high in the mountain had toppled over and was heading at speed for the farm, he started to run, going at a clop up the hill to the duckhouse, he wanted to save the ducks because he’s a great bird-lover, the ducks are my friends, Kiddi interjected before dozing off, he dashed into the duckhouse and started to flush out the ducks, but maybe that wouldn’t help so he began to drive them back in, just then he heard a violent hissing approaching at thunderous speed, he felt like the mountain had become a coffee pot and the coffee was boiling and the coffee pot was going to burst from the pressure or a giant goose come hissing at a run with outstretched wings and tongue stuck out and he did not know whether he was coming or going! … it burst into the hut and whipped it into the air so it flew up high, floating up in the air a long time, the whole house tumbling back and forth and crushing some ducks under it which really displeased Kiddi, from the duckhouse he could see far and wide across the countryside, out to Ingólfshöfði, across Skeiðarársandur, up the mountains and valleys, the hills, the cliffs, all the impassable routes, everywhere Kiddi had gone on the annual round-up, he thought to himself, I’ve been here and I’ve been here, I’ve been here, and he was pleased with himself until a duck walked past him and said, as the house blew past Illukletta in Hafrafell: You’ve not done the round-up here … then the gust died down, the hiss fizzled out, but hot rain poured into the house like coffee into a cup, the duckhouse landed high up in the woods, Kiddi stepped safely out but all the ducks had been crushed, they were eaten that evening and everyone got cheerful, the duckhouse’s journey roused a lot of attention and the event was written about on the back cover of the newspaper Morgunblaðið, Sunday, 14th October, 1990, and you can see from the news this isn’t an exaggeration, this gale rolled up the asphalt on the national highway all the way to Svínafell and a tourist bus was blown away, shattering all the windows and cutting people to death.

  I’ve never been so fascinated by anything in all my life, said The Regular at Hálsasker, as much as the hovercraft on Skeiðarársandur which the gold-seeking prospectors used, it remained a lone, deep dream, somehow impossible, I don’t even know if I saw it with my own eyes or just heard Kiddi talk about it and so see it vividly before me, I feel like I’ve sat inside the hovercraft and felt it lift off the earth, the awesome noise of the engine as it starts up, how it glides over the whole sand and the rivers and quicksand, like being on the back of a ghost or dragon, at that moment it felt like the most amazing vehicle in the world and the most impossible, it had to save everyone but was saving no one, it had to be from the future but was recent, like a sailing wagon from the 18th century; a forgotten dream napping inside oneself, stirring slightly sometimes like a dragon on its gold, filling you with bliss, raising everything up into the air.

  During the war years, a balloon was seen gliding unmanned from the ocean out past Svínafell and heading into the mountains, said The Regular. The next day more balloons could be seen and men stood on the slopes to look at them, some floated up high while others headed low into the valleys. Children and adults leaped up and chased the balloons into the wilderness. The balloons were made of light material, yet dense enough to hold water well, so-called Zeppelin fabric, said The Regular, and the balloons were double-layred, the inner white and the outer made of the same material but with aluminum on the outside. The balloon that floated across Svínafell was found high in Hvannadal and was carried home in small pieces, most people took two or three trips to carry precious material home. The balloons had a lot of twined cable which people felt would be good for bridle reins; after the Öræfings started sewing raincoats out of the balloon materials it was mentioned that they rather stood out, going around the province in silver-colored garments and with twine bridle-reins, the garments aroused some wonder among those who did not know the custom, and around that time a teacher from Reykjavík went to the county and stayed at a farm in Suðursveit that had an impressive library, that evening he took down the book Invasion from Mars to read, it’s a tale of invaders from outer space in silvery garments and how no earthly army could stop them, he was late getting up the next morning and when he checked on the weather he saw men in silver-colored clothes heading to the farm, he startled, but got his natural color back when he was told that these were men from the next region, Öræfings. During the war years, all kinds of stuff and trash drifted to the shore, as at other times, The Regular said
, in amongst the driftwood, which had always been a significant amount, there now drifted more than timber: planks, boards, cylindrical posts, beams, various scraps of wood, and much more than that washed up, car wheels, rims and tires, hub caps, bits of rubber, lifeboats, unmanned boats, gas tanks, flasks, bottles and cans, various little things, and other stuff drifted in, dozens of landmines arriving at the shore and exploding as they crashed into the beach, smoke columns rising up high from the sand, visible from the farms and dispersed over about 500 meters, these were button mines, later there were almost exclusively magnetic mines, many mines drifted in at Ingolfshöfði and the blasts were heard all over the region and the farm houses quaked when the booms echoed off the mountains.

  During the winter of 1982, high winds and violent storms and hurricanes traversed Öræfi; the harried inhabitants couldn’t remember comparable weather, The Regular said, there were many broken telephone poles and electricity poles, windows cracked and roofs blew off in most towns, vegetated lands were damaged by flung gravel, the Eastern Way bus was out east, loaded with passengers heading home for Christmas, but the weather was so bad buses couldn’t get back or forth, its windows shattered in a hail of rocks and everyone had to stay put for the night in a violent storm of rocks and broken glass, sheltering under floor mats, there was a man taking a trip in a passenger car when a rock hail smashed all the windows in the car, the man was heading to a farm but his car was flung into the air and blown off the road, he said in an interview that he had been afraid he was going to be blown out to sea, that the force of the wind had been enormously weighty, had beaten him down, he crawled along the road with a pocket flashlight in his jaw for many miles before he came, lacerated, to shelter in the bus that was on the road; that saved his life. The Skeiðará flooded and did a lot of damage to vegetation and structures; it changed the landscape. By then, there were as many foreign tourists as domestic ones. That same winter Halley’s comet was seen in Öræfi, some cows and sheep went mad and had to be put down, dogs were inconsolable and howled and whined at this comet in the star-studded winter sky as the glacier glowed and muttered; one evening Flosi from Svínafell saw a floodlight on the mountains as he walked home from the outbuilding but when asked for details he did not want to talk about it, it’s nothing, said Flosi, said The Regular, but men knew it meant something was bound to occur in the region and they waited apprehensively for the days to lighten. A farmer in Hof was walking home from the next town one evening, he was engulfed by thick fog and darkness and couldn’t see where he went, then a kernel of light appeared in front of him, swinging low over the ground, the size of a child’s head, with sparks coming from it, the illuminated head lit up the road and accompanied the farmer, then the head disappeared and he reached home. Perhaps it was ball lightning showing him the way, though nobody knew what it was. The comet was first seen out west before Christmas, it had a long radiant tail that reached up into the air, it looked as though it was going to crash to the ground, but it rose up fast day after day, all the way through the end of February, and learned men tell us that comets portend tumult, a sign of transformations both spiritual and worldly, comets are omens for battles and bloodshed, these learned folks say, for the earth’s fruitlessness, for terrible hunger and disease, both for humans and animals, one night red northern lights could be seen, which did not bode well, the moon was marked with a cross and three suns floated in the west, and now people felt it was enough, in one sunset there was a glowing red cross rising high into the sky, it lasted only a short while and few saw it, then the crossbar disappeared and only the post remained, more people than just Flosi experienced the floodlight and saw lights and symbols in the sky, people were taken aback and there was fear across the nation when all of this was spoken about and reported by the papers, the week before the month of Þorri begins, late January, a great snowstorm crashed to land and two men came riding into Skaftafell, frozen statues stuck to their saddles, their faces black with frostbite, when the ranger tried to remove one of the bodies from the horse’s back, its hand fell off but its torso stuck fast, then all the man’s limbs came loose and fell to the ground, breaking into a thousand pieces, there were reports of a fish out east with a man’s countenance but a fish’s body, it had hands instead of fins and that monster went all around the region, there was an ugly flu in the North and the Netherlands during the winter the comet was in the sky, meteors crashed down onto the glacier and rolled down the mountain side, they broke apart with a boom, illuminated, then vanished down into crevasses with a din, clocks rang of their own accord and corpses recited horrible quatrains on their biers and from their graves, especially those who weren’t silver-tongued when alive, men were seen in the sky, the earth quaked, cracks opened and the water in them ran blood-red, a stench rose up from them, deadly to people and animals, especially to birds flying overhead and diving down from the sky, one evening that winter Kiddi and I were with his great-grandmother in the room in Svínafell and we were looking out onto the sand as lightning flashes crisscrossed it and we watched terrified, said The Regular, especially because Kiddi’s great-grandmother seemed to dread everything that was happening, she was 100 years old and had seen everything and we didn’t think she feared anything, the lightning didn’t let up until the morning, when the weather passed over the farm, and then the phone began to ring automatically, although nobody was on the phone and it was out of its cradle, flashes spat from the radio and the coffee machine poured coffee from itself, the toaster toasted bread, the kettle boiled water, the oven baked, then there was thunder and lightning and the house started shaking. That winter, Kiddi and I read Wonders of the World, Flying Saucers, Guinness Book of World Records and The Annals of Gísli Oddsson, and we became uneasy and afraid of the world. Sometimes in the evenings people said: there’s a light on the sand. I always got a strange feeling in my breast at that, and we ran to a window to see the light on the sand, was it someone coming to the region, would they drive past, going further east? Who could it be? They would have to stop at Skaftafell, even though the area’s more built up now, this is an uninvited guest, I thought with a half-unusual feeling, coming into my world, where I’m still totally alien, here where I’m a foreign body totally without rights, a stranger, people would turn to one another, usually everyone knows who’s coming, but Kiddi and I kept hanging out at the window and watching the car lights, back then it was news to see a light on the sand, now there’s a constant light from traffic over the sand and it’s only news if there’s no light to see, now everyone only walks over to the window to see no light on the sand, but that almost never happens. Once again the Skeiðará flooded, making a big gap in the road, and ice floes rolled all over the sand with din and booms. That summer the treasure ship Het Wapen van Amsterdam was found, said The Regular, the nation sprang into frenzy and excitement and followed the news closely in the newspapers and on the radio. The very same day, two Swiss sisters were traveling around the East Skaftafell region, young and carefree, one was twenty-one years old, her name was Lucette Marie, her sister, Marie Luce, was twenty-nine years old, they were young, well-to-do ladies in search of adventure before life’s seriousness took over, they were enchanted by the untouched nature, the wide expanses, the freedom, they’d traveled through the country hitchhiking for three months and had gone a long way, they rambled around as they pleased, they took jobs in a freezing cold plant out west to earn a little money, everyone they met on this journey had good things to say about them, they were so open and beautiful and joyful, got on extremely well together. This particular Monday they were about a kilometer outside the village of Höfn in Hornafjörður, which is the east part of Eastern Skaftafell region, a green Mercedes Benz came driving past, on top of the car was a sign which read FÍB Road Service, it was an employee from the Association of Icelandic Automobile Owners, the man in the green Merc offered the girls a ride, asking where they were headed, they said they were on the way to Jökulsárlón, he picked them up and said he would drive them there
, Lucette Marie sat in front but her older sister Marie Luce was in the back, the driver of the FÍB car asked where they were from and they told him, he himself had never been so fortunate to go abroad, in fact, he did not especially want to go abroad, though he had nothing against going to Switzerland, yet on the other hand, said the driver, that would probably be too much for me, what did they think about the mountains and Vatnajökull, they said they were extremely impressed and couldn’t wait to see the famous glacier lagoon, Jökulsárlón, they felt Icelanders were lucky to have such untouched nature, it’s all so free, said Lucette Marie, and the man looked at her in amazement. The FÍB man drove them all the way to Jökulsárlón and the journey took an hour, most of it silent, with the sisters watching the glacier, the mountains, and the rural farms on the right side of the road, but also looking out the windows on the left side at the sand, the shore and the sea, and when Lucette Marie looked at the sea, the FÍB man felt she was looking at him. All three parties’ scant English put a limit on communication. The FÍB man drove off the road along a small trail to a sandhill and parked there, taking a break from driving to walk to the lagoon with the sisters, a cool breeze confronted them together with the spectacular view of ice floes on the lagoon, from time to time they could see seals stick up their heads and look inquisitively at them, the sisters were highly impressed, Lucette Marie took pictures of her older sister in front of the lagoon on her Olympus Trip 35, inside it was black and white film that she was going to have developed, along with many other films, Lucette Marie was going to start studying at the Basel Academy of Art in the autumn following the trip, she’d always taken pictures and developed everything she took in a dark room, Marie Luce had a beret on her head in the pictures and was in a thin coat that fluttered in the breeze, Lucette tried to get some shots of the seals but they appeared too far away in the 35mm lens, just black and bent shadows in the glacial water, it was the seals who greeted them that day, the FÍB man got tired of waiting around and offered to take the girls further but the sisters said they were planning to stay at Jökulsárlón, in Slysavarnarskýli, the so-called shelter hut. The FÍB man offered to look into it for them and they accepted, a little while later he returned, saying that the shelter was full, but they shouldn’t panic because he would drive them to another shelter, at Skeiðarársandur, which is all the way at the end of the Öræfi region. On the way out to the car, the FÍB man told the sisters that the shelter huts weren’t for tourists, they were strictly for people in hardship, places of refuge, not hotels, what if all the tourists stayed in huts for free? The tourist industry would get no money, nor would the State, which gets money from foreign exchange income and taxes, it is tax evasion against the Icelandic state, staying in the shelter huts, said the FÍB man, those refuges are for the shipwrecked, for those in danger, you aren’t in any danger, right? The FÍB man asked the sisters, but he would still make an exception to the rules, only once, if they did not mind, they praised and thanked him, shamefaced and taken aback, Icelandic friends had advised them to go stay in the huts, they said, that’s idiotic! said the FÍB man on the way out to the car at the Jökulsárlón, it’s beyond idiotic! tourists ought not to stay in the shelter huts, the shipwrecked should stay in the shelter huts, what if shipwrecked men come to a shelter hut and there’s a lot of tourists and no space for them, or if all the emergency shelters have been used and all the warm clothes taken, they are sacred houses, said the FÍB man and his voice broke, holy houses, but I will make an exception. There was not much chattering in the car on the way from the lagoon to Skeiðarársandur. It was around 8pm when they arrived at the Skeiðarársandur refuge house. Lucette and Marie thanked the man for the journey and went into the hut to get settled in. The FÍB man drove back east. The Swiss girls got ready to sleep, finding the shelter house fitting if rather dilapidated; they chatted and browsed the books. It’s great to get such a long vacation from work and everything, said Marie Luce, among other things, it absolutely saves my life. At 11pm the FÍB-man came back and wanted them to come out to the car, the sisters were asleep and were rather unhappy the FÍB man had come back again, he said there was a police officer around who claimed they had been smoking hash … Come with me, said the FÍB man, but they had not been smoking hash, said The Regular, just lying in bed reading and going to sleep, they kindly asked the man to leave, thanked him again and asked him to kindly leave them in peace now. Then the man stormed away and went to his car, they hoped he would clear off but then he came back to the refuge hut and said, “This is your last chance to come with me!” He had electrical wire and a shotgun with him and wanted to tie the girls up with the wire and lead them out. They struggled with him and the older sister, Marie Luce, scuffled with the man but the younger sister ran out in confusion. The FÍB man struck Marie Luce in the head with the gun shaft, she fell to the floor, then he repeatedly beat her head until she fell unconscious on the floor, her face in a pool of blood, next the man ran out after Lucette and shot her in the back from 35–40 meters; she fell to the ground. The FÍB man walked over to her and pulled her to the car and put her in the back seat, then drove down the highway. He drove the car east. Lucette was still alive and lay fatally wounded in the back seat, she struggled up with great effort, saw the back of the FÍB man at the wheel, the night had taken hold of the vehicle, she looked through the back window and saw car lights on the road, she opened the back door and threw herself out the car. The FÍB man braked sharply and ran out to look for her. A commercial vehicle approached, the driver saw the green Merc out of its lane and slowed down because he saw a man standing outside the car, he wound down the window and heard a terrible emergency cry from a girl who was crawling away from the car all bloody. What’s going on? asked the truck driver, with a trembling voice, he was a young man, under thirty. There’s been an accident, said the FÍB man, I ran over her in the dark. Lucette crawled to the lorry and climbed up the steps and gripped the mirror with her hand and yelled at the driver: Help me! He’s killing me! He’s killing me! What’s going on? asked the truck driver again, his voice even less sure, but the FÍB man repeated that there’d been an accident, he had driven over the girl in the dark, she was dizzy from the impact, in shock and senseless, he was trying to calm her down and get her into the car, he had been trying to call for help on the car’s telephone but it was somehow broken. Hurry to Skaftafell to get help, said the FÍB man to the truck driver, find a doctor and the police. When the truck driver was about to drive off, the girl hung fast on the driver’s side door and shouted: Help me! He’s gonna kill me! Help me! Get the girl off the car so I do not drive into her, said the truck driver. Then the FÍB man pulled the girl screaming from the truck. The truck driver drove away, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the man was standing over the girl and holding her by the automobile, then the image receded and vanished into the night. A few moments later, the FÍB man took Lucette Marie in a choke hold and pulled her back toward the car, he opened the trunk and stuffed her in. The truck driver ran into another truck at the bridge across Skeiðará and asked him to contact the National Phone Network to report the accident, but the driver said he did not have the radio phone connected because of new regulations that prohibited doing so while the radio phone system was being updated. Then they drove off in their respective directions, the truck driver noticed car lights in the rear-view mirror, wondering where the car was coming from, because he had not seen anyone on the sand, the car drove behind him all the way but didn’t turn into Skaftafell like the van but continued eastward instead. The park rangers at Skaftafell were finishing their work at 1 in the morning and saw the truck arriving at a dreadful speed and braking hard, the driver jumped out saying that an accident had occurred at Skeiðarársandur and asked the ranger to call a doctor and the police immediately, they were connected to the police in the region, who were based at Svínafell, and who arrived within a few minutes. The rangers took the police out to the sands to the scene of the accident. Nobody was there, the car
had disappeared and there was nothing to see. They continued west over the sand all the way to Gígjukvísl and turned back there. Did this mean that the man had himself driven the girl to get her medical care, should they assume that, that everything had turned out for the best? Just then someone staggered out of the darkness into the light-cone of the automobiles, waving; the police attendant braked and a girl collapsed, exhausted, against the hood, her face covered in blood, her eyes staring panic stricken at them, she had a major head injury and was bleeding a lot. This was opposite the shelter hut at Skeiðarársand. They sped directly to Skaftafell with Marie Luce and got her under a doctor’s care so her wounds could be tended right away, she had five ugly lacerations on her head. Marie Luce was able to describe what had happened with incredible accuracy and clarity, despite being in shock. Immediately there was a search for a green Merc from the Association of Icelandic Automobile Owners, and the authorities in East Skaftafell Region already knew who the driver was, using the description of the older sister to work out the man and the car. The car that drove behind the truck must have been the green Merc. The night’s search bore no results. The car was found at 9:00 AM Tuesday morning at Hafrafell up by Svínafellsjökull. The FÍB man had jumped out and run into the mountains armed, said The Regular, Lucette Marie’s body lay in the trunk compartment of the car, badly used and with a gunshot wound in her back, it was thought she had died sometime in the night in the trunk, she either suffocated or bled out. Extensive searches were conducted on Svínafellsjökull and nearby, and the chief magistrate of East Skaftafell district, Friðjón Guðröðarson, operated with great assurance, warning the people on the nearby farms and telling the farmers to check around and take care in the outbuildings, he secured a helicopter from the Coast Guard to come participate in the search, he warned tourists at the camp site in Skaftafell and forbade all hiking in the park, he got the Scout Rescue Unit from Hafnarfjördur to assist because they had a powerful search dog, a bloodhound, the only one in Iceland, named Perla; a stranger creature had never been seen in Öræfi. Friðjón Guðröðarson stood in the parking lot at Skaftafell; he was a tall man with big, thick, tinted glasses, wore his tinted glasses both inside and outside, it irked many that he always wore the sunglasses, even in meetings and at the office, he had a dense black beard and was thick-lipped, his hair flecked with gray, he was trim, wearing a trendy suit and a spotted tie. The bloodhound, Perla, began searching at the green Merc and immediately took a heading up Svínafellsjökull, she raced up the trail to a huge crater that was about 100 meters deep, it was thought that the FÍB man was down there. Due to the time and the darkness, it was decided to wait to rappel down the glacial crater until the morning. At dawn, just as two zealous men from the province were getting ready to rappel down into the glacier, Perla found another trail that led away from the crater and west from Hafrafell up under Illukletta; the searchers came to a shelter built against a small cave a little way up the mountain. The Scout Rescue Unit went to investigate and saw the man in the cave, he had blocked the way and closed up the cave with small trees and vegetation, and he lay there dozing with a folded rifle and a shotgun in his lap. The scouts bid him good morning and asked whether he wasn’t cold, the man half-woke and looked up, then a scout said: I’m going to take your rifle, friend. The FÍB man assented and extended him the weapon. The scout seized the cold barrel, but the FÍB man clung to the shaft, and their eyes met. Be careful, the FÍB man told the scout, it’s loaded. Then he let go of the shaft, and the scout took the rifle and disarmed it. And the gun, the shotgun, said the scout, but the FÍB man took it and emptied it himself, saying, I’m not going to use this on you, lads. These days were dark over Öræfi, the nation struck by dread, because the news appeared alongside the awesome progress taking place in Öræfi, the magistrate Friðjón Guðröðarson informed the media as soon as something happened, honestly answering the media and telling the truth since it couldn’t damage the investigation, which was in reality no investigation, it was quite unprecedented to be so open to the public, the custom was to fight the news or baldly lie to the media, which does great damage to the story of the future, said The Regular, we are not in some gangster-game here, the magistrate Friðjón Guðröðarson told journalists in Reykjavík by telephone from Skaftafell Visitor Center, from where he controlled the operation, we know who the man is and he knows who we are, everyone in the country is a known entity, he’s just Friðrik Albert, he knows we’re looking for him and we just need to find him before he does any more damage, although I do not believe he will, said the magistrate. Friðrik Albert had often pretended to be a cop on the highway and stopped cars for driving too fast, although the person was going the legal speed, he took the law into his hands, pulling people over; he was thought a bit of a fool. The treasure ship was found and the murderer was found, the nation celebrated. The murderer was declared not a murderer but a sick man; the treasure ship turned out not to be a treasure ship but a rusty trawler, The Regular said in Hálsaskeri.