For any $n>1$ we determine the uniform and nonuniform lattices of the smallest covolume in the Lie group $\operatorname {\mathrm {Sp}}(n,1)$ . We explicitly describe them in terms of the ring of Hurwitz integers in the nonuniform case with n even, respectively, of the icosian ring in the uniform case for all $n>1$ .

Let $G(n)={\textrm {Sp}}(n,1)$ or ${\textrm {SU}}(n,1)$ . We classify conjugation orbits of generic pairs of loxodromic elements in $G(n)$ . Such pairs, called ‘nonsingular’, were introduced by Gongopadhyay and Parsad for ${\textrm {SU}}(3,1)$ . We extend this notion and classify $G(n)$ -conjugation orbits of such elements in arbitrary dimension. For $n=3$ , they give a subspace that can be parametrized using a set of coordinates whose local dimension equals the dimension of the underlying group. We further construct twist-bend parameters to glue such representations and obtain local parametrization for generic representations of the fundamental group of a closed (genus $g \geq 2$ ) oriented surface into $G(3)$ .

In this paper, we give an analogue of Jørgensen’s inequality for nonelementary groups of isometries of quaternionic hyperbolic space generated by two elements, one of which is elliptic. As an application, we obtain an analogue of Jørgensen’s inequality in the two-dimensional Möbius group of the above case.