THE ALMANNAJAU.
We rode for some time along an elevated plateau of very barren aspect till something like a break in the outline became visible a few hundred yards ahead. I had a kind of feeling that we were approaching a crisis in our journey, but said nothing. Neither did Zöega, for he was not a man to waste words. He always answered my questions politely, but seldom volunteered a remark. Presently we entered a great gap between two enormous cliffs of lava.
“What’s this, Zöega?” I asked.
“Oh, this is the Almannajau.”
“What! the great Almannajau, where the Icelandic Parliament used to camp!”
“Yes, sir; you see the exact spot down there below.”
And, in good truth, there it was, some hundreds of feet below, in a beautiful little green valley that lay at the bottom of the gap. Never had my eyes witnessed so strange and wild a sight. A great fissure in the earth nearly a hundred feet deep, walled up with prodigious fragments of lava, dark and perpendicular, the bases strewn with molten masses, scattered about in the strangest disorder; a valley of the brightest green, over a hundred feet wide, stretching like a river between the fire-blasted cliffs; the trail winding through it in snake-like undulation—all now silent as death under the grim leaden sky, yet eloquent of terrible convulsions in by-gone centuries and of the voices of men long since mingled with the dust. Upon entering the gorge between the shattered walls of lava on either side, the trail makes a rapid descent of a few hundred yards till it strikes into the valley. I waited till my guide had descended with the horses, and then took a position a little below the entrance, so as to command a view out through the gorge and up the entire range of the Almannajau.
ENTRANCE TO THE ALMANNAJAU.