Nº 1.
THE REYKJALIÐ AND NÁMARFJALL SPRINGS.
Nº 2.
PLAN OF FREMRI-NÁMAR.
Nº 3.
PLAN OF LEIRHKNÚKR & KRAFLA (SPRINGS.)
veils, and hardly saw a “Mý”—but then, the cold weather was against the “bodies of Behemoths and the stings of dragons.” Nor did we find Mý-vatn “a place where birds and fishes abound, and where many of the wonders of Iceland are concentrated.” Every student of the avi-fauna who has sighted the pool, from the days of Proctor and Krüper to those of Shepherd[160] and Baring-Gould, makes it a very happy hunting-ground: all give lists which bring water to the sportsman’s mouth. Ten short years, however, have made the latest obsolete. We did not meet with a single Iceland falcon, once so common; the birds, with the exception of gulls, a host of sandpipers, and plucky little terns, whose sharp beaks threatened our heads and eyes, were rare in the extreme; and we found defunct chicks at every few hundred yards. Although we boated and shot over the ugly puddle, our only bag consisted of a mallard, a widgeon, a few grebes and pipers, and the Sefönd or horned grebe (Podiceps cornutus or auritus?), tufted on both sides of the head. The waters supplied trout and char; there is no salmon, as the fish cannot leap the falls twenty-five miles from the lake. Dead shells lay everywhere upon the spumy margin, and the corpse of a duck was found studded with mollusks. The soil, disintegrated volcanic rock, is of the richest; some thirty farms and farmlets are scattered about the Hlíðar or ledges between the several lava-gushes; and the pastures support some 3000 sheep.
The Mý-vatn is somewhat in the delta shape, with the apex fronting west (⊳), and with the base extending seven to eight miles: its drain, the Laxá frá Mý-vatn, escaping about the point and feeding the Skálfandi Fjörð, must be a mere torrent. North of it is the lumpy, uninteresting mound, Vindbeljarfjall, “wind-bellows hill;” the bag to the south, and the nozzle to the north-east; an African pair of bellows, i.e., one “bellow,” if such word there be. It is a trigonometrical station like the Hlíðarfjall, a bare cone north-east of Reykjahlíð. The points and promontories are most remarkable to the south, but these and other features will be better observed on the road to the Fremrinámar.
My general survey ending about noon, I set out for Leirhnúkr and Krafla under the guidance of Hr Pètur Jónsson, the farmer of Reykjahlíð. The tall, burly old man, made taller by contrast with his little Jack nag, had fenced himself against the grey mist and skurrying sea-wind by the usual huge comforter meeting the billy-cock hat behind; by “conservators” of green glass, and by a mighty paletot of the thickest Wadmal. We followed yesterday’s road, and now I carefully observed the lay of the land. Beyond the green and grassy point, Höfði (the headland), we came upon sundry veins of lava about a century and a half old, and much like slag: where Palagonite-conglomerate forms the surface, begin the Sandfell and the Hlíðarnámar (Lithewells), the latter wrongly confounded in the map with the Námar to the east of the Námafjall range. A couple of boards some six inches long were the only signs of work. The dirty-yellow mountain, striped from top to toe, as if washed by rain, with primrose, brick-red, dark blue, pea-green, light blue, and chalky-white, now stood smoking before us; and beginning the ascent, we passed the two boulders of pure sulphur, from which every traveller has carried off a bittock. Threading the Námaskarð by a decent path, we wound first to south and then to north, till we sighted the mud caldrons on the eastern slope. In Henderson’s day they numbered twelve; in 1872 apparently they were on their “last legs:” two lay to the north, four to the south; they were shaped like Sitz baths, and they ejected, with a mild puff which could not be called a roar, spirts of repulsive slime, blue-black, like mud stained by sulphate of iron. These “Makkalubers” contrasted strongly with the patches of lively citron and sprightly pink all about the slopes. One traveller finds it a “most appalling scene”—he must be easily “appalled.”
Debouching upon the eastern plain, we rode along the foot of the Dalfjall (dale-hill), which continues the Sulphur Range to the north, hugging the sides to avoid the Steiná, another bed of newish lava, an impossible mass of cinder, brown, black, and red, on our right. The path was well grown, but the “lady of the woods” (birch) is a dwarf in these parts, and looked tame beside the patches of Dryas. We flushed sundry ptarmigan, which were certainly not “absurdly tame.” After an hour and a half of “Trossacks,” which on return was covered in forty-five minutes, we halted at Skarðsel, a little Setr or summer shieling, a mere “but and ben” without tún, a heap of peat and stones grubbed out into rooms. The primitive churn found in every dairy shows that the ewes’ cream is here made into cheese, whilst the skim-milk forms the national Skýr. Of course the animals are poor and thin all the year round—the effect of continued “drain upon the constitution.”
Beyond the Skarðsel, we began to ascend and round sundry diseased and mangy hills, walking up the higher pitches, and riding over peat mounds, based upon oldish lava. After a total of two hours, we dismounted at the foot of Leirhnúkr (mud-knoll), where the horses’ hoofs flung up mere sulphur, and where warm, damp air escaped from every hole. The view from the summit convinced me that the emplacement has been poorly described by travellers. It is the northern head of a thin spine, a sharp prism about a mile broad, lying almost upon a meridian (215° mag.), and continuing the heights of Thríhyrningr, Dalfjall, and Námafjall. At some distance to the north-west rises the snowy buttress, Gæsadalsfjöll (geese-dale hills), almost concealing the Kinnarfjall (cheek or jaw mountain). Nearer lies a chain of cones and craters, with sundry outliers; they seem to have discharged a torrent nine miles long by three of maximum breadth, which inundated the north-eastern corner of the Mý-vatn with veins and arteries of fire; and the scatter of hornitos and fumaroles to the north has also aided in the work of destruction, or rather reconstruction. The map shows only a patch of lava reaching from Leirhnúkr to the Hlíðarfjall cone south-west.
The Leirhnúkr proper is composed of two hillocks trending north and south; the southern is larger than the northern, and the whole, a long oval extending some 2000 paces, is one vast outcrop. The lowland to the east is far broader than the western, a mere slip; here frequent splotches of sulphur and anaphysemata, or gas vents, lead to the Krafla springs. The aneroid showed the summit of the Mud-Knoll to be about 2000 feet above sea-level. Henderson (i., p. 167) calls it a volcano, and connects it with his other volcano, Krafla, by a non-existing ridge; but with him, omne ignotum, etc.—Hrossaborg and even Herðubreið are volcanoes. When he compares the scenery with that of the Dead Sea, one of the fairest of salt-water lakes, we must remember that his idea of “Asphaltites” was borrowed from that lively modern writer, Strabo.