listening to elves

Alda explains how some people might have come to believe in elves...
happy partying elves, inside the mountains

My Iceland: the glamorous opulence of the hidden people

"...When we were about halfway along the full stretch of the rock face to our right, we suddenly heard this amazing sound. It was a huge party going on somewhere, a banquet, with hundreds of people laughing and talking, classes clinking, cutlery scraping on dinnerware - a cacophony of merriment coming from somewhere beyond the cliffs.

We stopped dead in our tracks, looked at each other with bewildered expressions, then looked around in astonishment. Where was that sound coming from? Was it from the campsite? No, we decided it couldn't be; we'd only just left and the number of people required to make that sound, not to mention all those glasses and dinnerware, could not possibly have arrived in such a short space of time. Was it from the town? Hardly; the town was too far away and the sound seemed like it was just beyond our line of vision.
In fact, it sounded like it was coming from inside the cliff, but obviously we knew that wasn't a possibility. Was there a banquet hall behind the cliff somewhere? Or back from where we came? We certainly hadn't seen one, but of course we couldn't rule it out."

Explains a lot.