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Long lines of crags,

stirred by the utter strangeness of this untravelled ocean, and perhaps by a slight sense of danger, since nobody on board had ever seen the harbour of Seyðisfjörðr for which we were making. As the vessel drove swiftly nearer, the features of the coast revealed themselves, but the sense of mystery and danger grew almost stronger. black or of a grey more dismal than black, rose out of a deep deep sea, sometimes in sheer precipices, piled in terraces one above another, sometimes in steep slopes of loose stone, topped by a range of cliff with more rock slopes and more cliffs above. Highest of all, where the tops of the cliffs seemed to run back into a lofty table-land, walls of rock enclosed deep dark hollows, where the sun never came to melt the snow that filled them; and, last of all, further back still, sharp peaks and glittering icefields rose above the table-land, and peered down into the heads of these high ravines. Far up into the heart of this mountain mass ran the narrow winding fiords, the mouth of each guarded by a towering promontory and fringed by rocky islets, over which the billows broke in sheets of foam, marking the whole coast with a line of white. No brushwood, no heather, upon all these slopes and faces, not a blade of grass to vary the black and lamentable brown, not a trace of pasture, not a human dwelling all along the shores, not a sail upon the water, but a cold, grey, cheerless, hazy sea stretching away towards the Pole till it met the cold and steely sky. One thought of that enchanted mountain in the Arabian Nights against which ships are driven in an unknown sea; and the thrill of awe and mystery was almost painful, until at length, the desired haven found, we passed between the tremendous portals of one of these long fiords, and gliding swiftly up, cast anchor under the slopes of smiling green that encircle its head.

A fortnight later we had an experience of inland scenery not less impressive. The whole interior of the island is a desert, and although great part remains unexplored, there are some four routes by which it may be crossed from north-east to south-west, and by one of which, the westernmost, where the desert region is narrowest, it is crossed pretty frequently. Another (Vatnajökulsvegr) has, so far as I know, been traversed only once, and can never be traversed without serious risk of losing the horses by hunger and exhaustion, and probably getting lost oneself. A third is taken perhaps once or twice a year, and the fourth (Vatnahjallavegr), which we had determined to follow, stimulated to some extent by the mystery that enveloped it, had not been tried for fifteen years or so, and was supposed to be known to only one man in the whole country side, and who bore the name (common in Iceland) of Sigurðr, the hero of the Völsunga Saga.

On Monday morning, at five A.M., we started, a party of seventeen horses, three guides, and three Englishmen, from the last house on the north side of the wilderness, a strange, lonely place, where the simple natives had crowded and buzzed round us all the day before, in mingled curiosity and kindness, as if we were visitors from another planet. Climbing out of the valley where this house lay, we reached a high undulating

plateau strewn with loose rough slabs of stone, like the pavement of a ruined city, with here and there sheets of black water,* too small for lakes, too big for pools; patches of bog, and beds of half-thawed snow. The slowly rising clouds showed all round the same country, a land without form and void, a land that seemed as if only half created, with no feature for the eye to dwell upon; neither peaks nor valleys, neither rocks nor grass, but everywhere bare, bleak, blank desolation. It was not always the same, for sometimes there was more snow, sometimes bog, sometimes only stone; but one had no sense of progress in it, and felt as if it might go on for ever. Late in the afternoon the stone changed to a rolling plain of black volcanic pebbles, and coming at last to an oasis of short grass, we halted for an hour to give the horses a feed, though a scanty one, and to discuss our course, for the clouds had now settled down upon us, and there was no seeing more than a few hundred yards in any direction. Track, or mark to indicate a track, there was of course none; and Sigurðr admitted that without the Jökull † to guide him, he could not tell where we were or which way we were going. Now, the Jökull, though one knew, from the number and whitish colour of the torrents we crossed, that it could not be very far off, was in such weather hopelessly hidden. Onwards, however, we pressed, for night was beginning to fall; and if we could not reach a scrap of pasture that lay some hours ahead, it might go hard with the horses. Everything depended on the horses, for our supply of food was scanty, and the next house one hundred miles away. The compass was consulted in vain, and Sigurðr shook his head more and more ominously, till at last, when it was almost dark, and the mist, driven by a piercing wind, was turning to a snow mizzle, there was nothing for it but to halt. The tent was taken off the horse that carried it, and, with fingers so numb that we could scarcely untie its cords, we set about pitching it, while the natives tied our seventeen horses tail and head together to keep them from running off during the night, as their wont is. The tent-pegs took no grip of the soft loose shingle, however deep we drove them in; but when one remarked that the pole would probably fall during the night and bury us all in the ruins, the other two only gave a shivering assent and crawled inside. Then the head of the commissariat served out supper, consisting of some fragments of mouldy biscuit and clammy mutton, with a carefully limited sip of corn brandy; waterproofs were laid down, pillows extemporized out of riding-boots, every scrap of clothing turned to account against the cold, and we lay down to court sleep. The native Icelander regards neither cold nor hunger; but we were less seasoned, and one at least of the party lay awake all night, freezing hard, longing, as Homer says, for the coming of fair-throned Morning, listening resignedly to the sounds, steady and strong as the beats of a steam-engine, that told of

Called, as we found to our amusement, "Ullarvötn," i.e. Ullswaters (= Woollakes).

†The term Jökull (J in Icelandic is pronounced as consonantal ) describes both a perpetual snow-mountain and the glaciers which issue from it.

the better fortune of a comrade, trying now and then to relieve the weariness by fixing his mind upon a point of law, but failing always, and slipping off into a wandering reverie, wherein England and civilisation, and all familiar things beyond the great sea, seemed plunged deep in the past, or whirled away to an illimitable horizon.

Next morning early when we again mounted and started, unrefreshed, upon our way, everything was still wrapped in cloud, and Sigurðr's mind most of all, he moaning at intervals, "If I could only see the Jökull!" About nine o'clock, however, the mist suddenly rose and then vanished, the sun shone out, and the wished-for Jökull appeared, a long, flat-topped, smooth-sloped ridge of ice (névé one would have called it in the Alps), four or five miles to the east of us, trending away south further than eye could reach. So the way was now plain, and we rode on as fast as the roughness of the ground permitted, where flats covered with the overflow of glacier torrents alternated with rocky or shingly hills, and with the iron billows of successive lava-flows. The scene was unlike yesterday's, as drear and solitary, but with a certain weird splendour of its own. On one side the smooth endless line of snow-field, on the other an immense plain, flooded with sunlight, with a few tiny volcanic cones rising on its extreme western marge. Right in front, two bold snowy mountain groups, the square mass of Lang Jökull, and opposite it five sharp icy pinnacles capping the ridge of Blángny Jökull; between them a depression, through which we were to pass to the south, and which, so clear was the air, seemed no nearer at six o'clock, after incessant quick riding, than when we had caught sight of it before noon.

The unfruitful sea is not more lonely or more waste than this wilderness, shut in by frozen barriers. Yet it was not a howling wilderness, such as that which awes a child's imagination in the Hebrew prophets, such as that we had traversed the day before; but full of a strange stern beauty, stilling the soul with the stillness of nature. There was not a cloud in the sky, not a bird, not an insect, not a floweret at our feet; only the blue dome of air raining down brightness on the black desert floor, the dazzling snows in front, and far away exquisite tints of distance upon the western peaks. And then the silence, what was ever like it? a silence, not as of death, but as of a time before life was. To us the scene was all the more solemn because of yesterday's cloud and the weary night, for there was nothing to connect what we now saw with the region we had left on the northern side of the desert; we could no more tell how we had got there than how we should get out. It was like a leap into fairy land; and indeed, despite our exhaustion, a delicious leap, for the air was so fine and keen, the sky so brilliant, the aspect of everything so novel, that the barrenness underfoot, and the sense of danger in case any misfortune befel us, so far from human help, did not seem to depress us; and each rode alone in a sort of grave exhilaration, gazing as in a dream at the hills and drinking in the sunlight, content with silence and the present.

The sun went down as we entered the majestic sand-strewn portal

between the two Jökulls, and the eastern one, on whose snows his light lingered longest, glowed with colours more glorious than any we could remember in the Alps; the rose perhaps less vivid than that which burns at dawn upon the Silberhorn, but with it an infinitely varied and tender alternation of violet and purple, opal, and pink and orange, passing from one tint to another in swift iridescent pulses till they died away into chilly blue. Darkness had hardly descended before what had seemed a steel-g -grey bank of cloud in the north-east turned to an auroral arch, which soon shot forth its streamers across the zenith, throbbing and glancing from one side of heaven to the other, and flinging themselves into exuberant folds and curves of vaporous light. We rode, first by its help, and then stumbling about in utter darkness, all night through, making only one or two short halts for the sake of the wearied horses. The ground was rough, and we were more than half asleep, exhausted by fasting and excitement, so how we got safely across was a marvel then, and remains so to us now.

When the saffron robe of morning was spread over the east, we were among new mountains, with the pass already far away; and when from behind one of their pinnacles the sun suddenly flamed up, we were descending towards the great White Lake (Hvitarvatn), one of the largest in the country, over whose bosom two glaciers streaming down between savage ink-black cliffs scattered a shower of miniature icebergs that sailed about, sparkling in the morning light. It was a wild and striking scene, but not in the least beautiful, and almost too savage to be grand. For there was nothing tender, nothing graceful, nothing picturesque to break the intense grimness of the black mountains, with their blunt, harsh lines, or give variety to the huge sheet of whitish-blue water that washed them; no waterfall flashed among the rocks, no copse wood clothed the glens or dipped into the lake. One had little temptation to linger, especially as the swans that fluttered over the icebergs were too wild to let us approach them; so we hurried on, and after some hours more gained from the top of another pass a boundless prospect over the great south-western plain of the island, Hekla guarding it to the south, while in the distance, puffs of steam marked the spot where the Geysers lie.

The land was greener to the eye, but it was still utterly waste and desolate, nor did we find a place to halt, a human dwelling, and that which is the chief support of life in Iceland, a draught of milk, till after a long and hard day's riding we came at evening to the solitary farm of Haukadalr. Here the valiant Sigurðr departed, having first kissed us after the manner of his people, to return home all alone across the desert; and from this we mounted the red Geyser hill,, and pitched our tent close to the boiling basin whence the Great Geyser rises, though now in his old age more rarely, and where all night long the earth shook beneath us with his thundering snorts and groans.

Having been thus betrayed into a sort of personal narrative, I am tempted to go on to describe the Geysers (which are, it need hardly be said, wholly unlike what one expects), and the ascent of Hekla (a perfectly VOL. XXIX -NO. 173.

27.

easy one, by the way, even in a snow storm), and the boiling mud-pits at Namaskarð, and the obsidian mountain of Hrafntinnuhryggr, and the great Myvatn (Midge water) Lake, where in July the gnats rise in clouds that hide the sun, and have been known (one hears) to devour a horse and his rider in ten minutes; and, what is most interesting of all, Thingvellir, the seat of the ancient federal parliament of the island, with its wonderful rock chasms, its lake, its waterfall, its Hill of Laws, its swirling pool into which witches were thrown, its island where judicial duels were fought out. Then there are incidents of travel without end to be enlarged on; the long weariful journeys on horseback at a foot's pace, usually ending in the dark, the encampments in the churches (which serve for inns, and though they supply nothing but a floor to lie down upon, and a pulpit to hang wet clothes from, are yet better than the biting winds without), the crossing of rivers, sometimes on a steed that can scarcely keep its footing among the stones, with the waves rising over its neck—sometimes where the stream is too deep for this amusement, driving in one's whole troop of cavalry with stones and whipcracking, and following in a leaky skiff which the torrent whirls away down its eddies; tent life and its pleasures (not so unmixed under the 66th parallel as Mr. Cook's tourists no doubt find them in Palestine); the internal economy of a baer, and the tricks one is driven to to get a whiff of fresh air among its ancient and fishlike smells, the conversations in dog Latin carried on with a worthy priest who has forgotten the little he once knew, the perpetual buying, selling, swopping, losing, searching for, and abandoning of horses, and general chaffering on the subject of horses, which goes on all day and every day, and which no linguistic difficulties seem to interrupt;* the food, an inexhaustible topic (although the items are so few), and the ardour with which the famished stranger pounces upon cold trout and sour curds, the only dainties an Icelandic larder supplies-all these and many more details of the whimsical life one leads there I pass over, spatiis exclusus iniquis, and leave to be told by others after me, as they have been

* The first remark which an Icelander makes when he meets you crossing a desert, after the salutation "Come thou blest!" is, "What will you take for that horse?" whereto you of course answer by naming thrice the animal's value, and the conversation proceeds in a way which can be imagined. I am tempted to transcribe a dialogue on the same topic which took place one morning during our stay at Reykjavík. Enter an Icelandic friend: "Bonus dies, domini." "Bonus dies, dulcissime. Sedeas, precor, sedeas, nobisque, si quid novi affers, imperti." "Equos nonne vobis in animo est vestros hic in urbe vendere?" "Immo equidem.” “Quomodo?" "Sub hasta." "Sed mihi alium vobis modum proponere liceat. Rusticus quidam ex familia mea nuper advenit; auditoque hominum sermone de equis vestris, mihi dedit mandatum vos rogare quantum pro nigro equo, quantum pro gilvo poscatis." (Short consultation among the vendors.) "Pro gilvo nos scito summam quadraginta imperialium (rikdalers), pro albo autem triginta quatuor poscere." "Gilvum quanti emistis? anne quinquaginta? Ecce autem rusticum meum, Steingrimum nomine.' Enter Steingrimr accordingly, and continuation of the bargain through the interpreter.

This is Skyr, a delicacy of long standing, since it is mentioned in the Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson and the Heimskringla. It is eaten with sugar and cream; and what cream!-cream in which the horn spoon stands erect!

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