166

THE VOLCANOES OF ICELAND.

cones have been thrown up, and small islands brought to the surface on the surrounding ocean, some of which have remained. The year 1783 was distinguished by volcanic displays of a tremendous nature; a submarine volcano burst out, which threw up such immense masses of scoriæ that the progress of vessels was impeded for many miles in its neighbourhood. Earthquakes were felt throughout the whole island, and in June they increased in violence; at which time, Skaptaa Jokul, a mountain throned amid perpetual snows and inaccessible precipices, was observed to give indications of volcanic activity. In the course of a few days the river Skaptaa —a stream of considerable size-disappeared, and torrents of lava from the mountains filled its bed, flowing in the rocky channel, two hundred feet wide, and in some places from four to six hundred feet deep. In many places, overflowing all barriers, the lava spread over the country to a great extent.

The traveller to whom the world is indebted for the latest and fullest description of the most remarkable scenes and objects in Iceland is Lord Dufferin. He made a trip to the island a few years since, and has very pleasantly described his tour in a volume entitled Letters from High Latitudes. A few extracts will amuse and instruct our readers, and the illustrations will enable them to realise the graphic text. They embrace a particular description of the event sketched above.

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THE CAPITAL OF ICELAND.

"THE panorama of the bay of Saxa-Fiord is magnificent: with a width of fifty miles from horn to horn, the one running down into a rocky ridge of pumice, the other towering to the height of five thousand feet in a pyramid of eternal snow, while round the intervening semicircle crowd the peaks of a hundred noble mountains. As you approach the shore, you are very much reminded of the west coast of Scotland, except that every thing is more intense: the atmosphere clearer, the light more vivid, the air more bracing, the hills steeper, loftier,― more tormented, as the French say,-and more gaunt. Between their base and the sea stretches a dirty greenish slope, patched with houses; while themselves, both roof and walls, are of a mouldy green, as if some long-since-inhabited country had been fished up out of the bottom of the sea. The effects of light and shade are the purest I ever saw, the contrast of colour most astonishing; one square front of a mountain jutting out in a blaze of gold against the flank of another dyed of the darkest purple, while up against the azure sky beyond rise peaks of glittering snow and ice.

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Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, stands on the shore of the bay. Though its site was determined by auspices not less divine than those of Rome or Athens, Reykjavik is not so fine a city as either. In fact, the town consists of a collection of wooden sheds, one storey high, built along the lava beach, and flanked at either

168

ICELANDIC FARMS.

end by a suburb of turf-huts.

On every side of it

extends a desolate plain of lava, that once must have boiled up red-hot from some distant gateway of hell, and fallen hissing into the sea. No tree or bush relieves the dreariness of the landscape, and the mountains are too distant to serve as a background to the buildings."

As it was necessary, in order to reach Jan Mayen and Spitzbergen during the summer (of 1856), that Lord Dufferin's stay in Iceland should not be prolonged above a certain date, he determined at once to make preparations for an expedition to the Geysers and the interior of the country. He proceeds to describe the journey:

"The first few miles of our ride lay across an undulating plain of dolorite, to a farm situated at the head of an inlet of the sea. At a distance the farm steeding looked like a little oasis of green, amid the gray, stony slopes that surrounded it, and, on a nearer approach, not unlike the vestiges of a Celtic earth-work with the tumulus of a hero or two in the centre; but the mounds turned out to be nothing more than the grass roofs of the house and offices, and the banks and dykes but circumvallations round the plot of most carefully cleared meadow, called the tùn, which always surrounds every Icelandic farm. This word tùn is evidently identical with the Scotch word toon, which, in its local signification, does not mean a congregation of streets and buildings, but the yard and spaces of grass immediately adjoining a single house... Turning to the right, round the head

of a little bay, we passed within forty yards of an enormous eagle seated on a crag. Soon after, the district we traversed became more igneous, wrinkled, cracked, and ropy than any thing we had yet seen; and another two hours' scamper over such a tract as till then I would not have believed horses could have traversed, even at a foot's pace, brought us to the solitary farm-house of Bessestast. Fresh from the neat homesteads of England, that we had left sparkling in the bright spring weather, and sheltered by immemorial elms, the scene before us looked inexpressibly desolate. In front rose a cluster of weather-beaten wooden buildings, and huts like ice-houses, surrounded by a scanty plot of grass, reclaimed from the craggy plain of broken lava that stretched-the home of ravens and foxes-on either side to the horizon. Beyond, lay a low black breadth of moorland, intersected by patches of what was neither land nor water; and last, the sullen sea; while above our heads a wind saturated with the damps of the Atlantic went moaning over the landscape.

"At last I have seen the famous Geysers, of which every one has heard so much; but I have also seen Thingvalla, of which no one has heard any thing. The Geysers are certainly marvels of nature; but more wonderful, more marvellous, is the lava vale, Thingvalla. Before going to Iceland, I had read every account that had been written of Thingvalla by any former traveller, and, when I saw it, it appeared to me a place of which I had never heard; so I suppose I shall come to grief in

170

THE ALMANNA GJA.

as melancholy a manner as my predecessors, whose ineffectual pages whiten the entrance to the valley they

"As it was already eight o'clock, and we had been told the entire distance from Reykjavik to Thingvalla was only five-and-thirty miles, I could not comprehend why we were still separated from our destination by a great space. Concluding more time had been lost in shooting, hunting, &c. by the way than we had supposed, I put my pony into a canter, and determined to make short work of the dozen miles which seemed still to lie between us and the hills, on this side of which I understood from Segudr (my guide) our encampment for the night was to be pitched. Judge, then, of my astonishment when, a few minutes afterwards, I was arrested in full career by a tremendous precipice, or rather chasm, which suddenly gaped beneath my feet, and completely separated the barren plateau we had been so painfully traversing from a lovely, gay, sunlit flat, ten miles broad, that lay-sunk at a level lower by a hundred feet -between us and the opposite mountains. I was never so completely taken by surprise.

"We had reached the famous Almanna Gja. Like a black rampart in the distance, the corresponding chasm of the Hrafna Gja cut across the lower slope of the distant hills; and between them now slept, in beauty and sunshine, the broad, verdant plain of Thingvalla-verdant by reason of the birch-brushwood with which it is in a great measure clothed.