Calculating the rhumb line from Panamints to 36.04 etc.
Yields:
Great Circle Distance:4671 n miles
Rhumb line distance 4975 n miles
Difference between rhumb and GC distance 301 n miles
rhumb line course 270deg
reverse rhumb line 90

"magnum opus et arduum" = a great and difficult work

clue=The airmail sticker is in Icelandic and there is a map of Iceland in the upper left of the 5/1/92 ad.
name=Repubgirl

10/22/00
clue=Re: the stamp.  Njal's saga was written in Icelandic.
name=Repubgirl

email=jessica@augustsson.net
clue=This may have already been mentioned, but 2 E Congress, 85701 is Bank One in Tucson.  Do you suppose that's the location
of Box #668, or would that just be too obvious?  Maybe someone could go there and see if it looked like the picture in the
Oct. 10, 2000 ad.  (Although most safety deposit boxes look very much alike.)
name=Jessica Augustsson

clue:  re: St Augustine quote
Only because I wrote it down on a piece of paper, and stuck it on my fridge: Homer J. (yes, Simpson) 
once said, "I feel like St Augustine of Hippel, after his conversion by Ambrose of Milan."  Probably 
not too helpful...

Njalssaga also has a number of important scenes at Thingvellir.  

36 04 N by 117 14 E is in Shandong province, China, but 36 04 N by 117 14 
W looks like Ballarat, California, near the south end of the Panamint 
range.  

clue:  All the historical figures they like (St. Augustine, Matthias 
whatever, even Schroedinger) all originally stood outside the mainstream 
of contemporary thought.  Against the grain and that kind of thing.  
Probably not much help but does pull all these interesting but apparently 
different historical characters into one frame of reference. 

clue:  Re: The Icelandic beneath the stamp: Jarngrimr at Lomagnupr.  Jarngrimr translates to "IronGrim" and is one of the (many)
names of Odin.  Lomagnupr is a place, and is called "Loom-nip" or just "the Nip" in the various translations of Njal's Saga.  The
word/name "gnupr" can be seen even now in placenames such as "The Noup", a hill in Scotland in an area where many Norse
placenames can be found.  So if we look for "IronGrim at Loom-nip" in section 132 of Njal's Saga we find a man named Flosi (in
earlier sections, it is Flosi who kills Njal by burning his house) who dreams that a man with an iron staff comes to him and
tells him that many of his men and allies are fated to die soon.  Flosi asks the man with the iron staff his name, and he replies
that his name is IronGrim.  

I find it interesting that it is Odin who comes to him in a dream when it states in section 96 that Iceland is converted to
Christianity.  Hmmmm....   More info as I find it...

couldn't the phrase "if i die before i wake" be part of a rhyme like "open box 668"?

Matthias, Schrodinger and Morgon are likely a physical item using "arbella" for a distrobution channel... grandpa's
farm is the pickup point and the orphanage is the dropoff point.

clue:  "if I die before I wake" on Sept 27/89 is a reference to a common child's prayer, that has many 
variations [editorial comments in square brackets]: "now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to 
keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord [angels, etc] my soul to take."

seems to indicate that if the operation doesn't work, they'll need some deus ex machina to pull it off? or 
that high-level assistance may be required.

The Panamints show up in some old Westerns but I can't remember the names.  I think one of them was a Ronald Reagan flick.

The vault might still be there.

Valley National Corp has been acquired indeed - but the buyer was no other but Bank One (which later merged with JPMorgan
Chase & Co.):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_One

It is likely, though, that the location might have changed since then.

 The Arbella was the flagship of the Winthrop Fleet. John Winthrop was a puritan LAWYER.