136 DANIEL Bruun. 
drew closer and closer together, ending in the richest and most fertile 
parts at the head of Lysufiord, now Ameralik, where they at last were 
vanquished. 
The Greenlander Lars MØLLER, the well known printer, editor 
and lithographer, told us in 1903 that at one place, now called Niaküssat 
on the north side of Ameragdla, where one sees sites of Norse 
ruins, human cranıums were found, a few years ago the Greenlander 
Jort (formerly Nansen’s companion now ours) had found two skulls of 
Norsemen (“Aablunaks”), in which there still stuck points of stone 
arrows. These last mentioned, which Lars Moller had seen, had been 
fetched by a Moravianhut-missionary, who soon after left the country 
with these interesting objects. Perhaps they had something to do with 
the last Norsemen in the western settlement, who were killed by the 
Skrællings. The discovery would in this case corroborate the above 
rendered Greenland legend, about the last act of “the western settlement’s 
ruin”, taking place in Ameragdla. It was not possible to substantiate 
with certainty a Norse churchyard, so it must be assumed that those 
killed were left where they fell. That the Skreellmgs did not take their 
arrows out again is easily explained by the Greenlanders usual horror 
of touching anyone dead. 
The western settlement, where in the colony’s days of vigour there 
had been ninety farms, possibly with a population of about one thousand 
persons, was a thing of the past. Ameralikfiord’s fine grass and wood- 
clad valleys and slopes echoed no longer the bleeting of sheep or the 
bellowing of oxen, and smoke rose no more from the numerous Norse 
farms. The houses collapsed, and on the homefields the grass was allowed 
to grow freely; but even now, a good five hundred years later, the 
ground here is covered with grass and flowers, which otherwise is not 
to be found outside the home-fields, here and there one still gets glimpses 
of dwelling-houses and stables which form eminences under the luxuriant 
grass. But up on the slopes the folds are still seen, where the sheep were 
milked and the lambs separated from them, even in some places the ruins 
of a few stone houses, still stand which probably were used as forrage 
houses. And in the narrow valleys, edged by the inland ice, where Eski- 
moe reindeer hunters now wander about during the summer, miles 
away from their home — one finds at long intervals grass-grown spots 
with a vegetation which the now-a-day Skrællings well know to ori- 
ginate from the Norse-times. Also here perhaps a few sites are to be 
seen commemorative of the Norsemen having their outfarms here during 
the summer, but further in, by lakes and rivulets the remains of huts 
are seen, where they stayed for the sake of salmon-fishing, like in 
the highlands right by the edge of the inland ice one finds old shooting- 
dams behind which they lay in wait for reindeer, and huts in which 
they lived, huts, which partly resemble those which are still used for 
sheep in the south of Iceland. They are shaped like a bee-hive erected 
