The “beginning, end, and aim” of sulphur seems to be fire. Poets and imaginative writers ever associate sulphur with fire. They give it a home equally with the lightnings of heaven and flames of hell, the roaring of artillery and the blazing of the volcano. It seems to have birth in the thunder-cloud; for, after the flash of lightning, we can smell it, and after the shower is over, it is often seen floating on the rain-water. To give one more quotation; King Lear says:

——“Merciful heaven,

Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt,

Split’st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak,

Than the soft myrtle.”

To drive a thunderbolt to split the myrtle, the game would not be worth the powder, I suppose.

Near the large bed of sulphur, were several mud springs, one several feet in diameter. Here the boiling hot mud, like pitch, was spluttering and splashing up into the air in jets. I gathered several large lumps of sulphur, and then climbed over a mountain ridge, and came to another similar place. Here sulphur had been gathered, and was constantly accumulating. It seems to be brought up by the heat that exhales from the interior of the earth, as it collects on every thing there is on the surface. If left for ages, I presume it would gather in some places hundreds of feet deep. Some have proposed the plan of laying boards on the ground for it to collect on. It would then be very clean, and easily gathered. In collecting it from the clay surface, considerable earth must often get in it, but there is a way of cleaning it. In places away from the sulphur, I saw the variety of beautiful colored clays, such as appeared so plentiful at the Geysers, and at Reykir. I had a comparatively easy walk down the mountain, through a sort of ravine, towards some hot springs and a green plain where the guide and horses were. Hearing a roaring sound on my left, I turned aside to learn the cause; and there was a steam spring, or rather a jet of steam, that rushed out of the mountain with a loud and constant roaring. The noise and escape of steam were incessant, the steam coming out in a slanting direction, at least twenty feet in a direct line. The noise it made was greater than that of one of our largest steamship engines “blowing off.” Without a doubt, if this was in a manufacturing country, a house could be built over this natural steam fountain, an engine erected, and by catching the steam in a cylinder, it could be made to do good service, and all without fuel, fire, or water, and perpetually. In Sir George Mackenzie’s book was a description and an illustration of this same jet of steam; and I held the picture up, and compared it to the present appearance of it, and apparently it had not altered a particle in forty-two years. This, with the six hundred years’ record of the Geysers, and the twenty-four eruptions of Hekla, shows the perpetual and constant volcanic heat near the surface of the ground in Iceland. Near to this was the most extraordinary mud spring I have ever seen. It was the largest and most active. It was a regular mud geyser. Imagine an enormous kettle ten feet across, sunk down into the earth, and filled to within six feet of the top, with hot, boiling, liquid mud. There it kept boiling and spouting; jets rising from its pudding-like surface ten and fifteen feet high; and it kept constantly going. Wouldn’t a fall into this cauldron of liquid pitch be boiling enough for one live animal! Perhaps a boiled rabbit in this unpromising kettle of “hell broth,” would be as good as the Indians’ way of rolling a fowl in the mud, and then roasting it. The sulphur mountains, and all that abound near them, are among the greatest curiosities of Iceland; but Mr. Barrow, the “very enthusiastic” yachter, did not visit them, because the morning he thought of going proved a little rainy! He also consoled himself for not going to visit Mount Hekla, because “it might have been cloudy” when he got there! This is your English traveler, all over. Many is the time that I have seen them forego the pleasure and profit—if such travelers could profit at all—of visiting the most interesting scenes, just because it would make a dinner-hour a little later or a little earlier than common.

A fine brook ran through the green plain, and emptied into a little lake not far away. It looked delicious enough to bathe in; and a bath in a warm pool or brook in Iceland is a luxury, such as I have tasted. In speaking of these sulphur mines where the sulphur is hot—and it is gathered on or near Mount Ætna in similar situations—it may be mentioned, that there are places where sulphur is to be found cold, and dug up like other minerals. When a boy, I recollect being laughed at greatly by my oldest brother, for asking if there were not “brimstone mines.” Go to! He that runs may read, and he that runs far enough may write. “The gods throw stones of sulphur on thee.”—Cymbelline. Go to.

CHAPTER XIX

“Over the hills and far away.”