REYKJAHLID CHURCH—(miraculously preserved).
work, found my companions busy in pitching the tent, despite the cold threats of night. They complained of the stranger’s room, although it rejoiced in such luxuries as two windows, a bed and curtains, looking-glass, commode, map, thermometer, and a photograph of Jón Sigurðsson. The house, with five gables, fronts west-south-west to “Wind-bellows hill;” here the south wind is fair and warm, the norther brings rain, the easter is wet, and the wester dry and tepid. As in England, the south-wester is the most prevalent, and flowers thrive best where best sheltered from it. The house has the usual appurtenances, workshop and carpenter’s bench; smithy and furnace; byre and sheep-fold. The shabby little windmill, with three ragged sails, goes of itself, like Miss K.’s leg; there is an adjacent Laug, of course never used, and the nearness of the lake renders a Lavapés (rivulet) unnecessary. Plough, harrows, watering-pot, and hay-cart are also evidences of civilisation, but the kail-yard is nude of potatoes—probably they require too much hard labour. Shabbier than the windmill, the church, bearing date 1825, lacks cross, and wants tarring; it has no windows to speak of, and the turf walls are built after an ancient fashion, now rare, the herring-bone of Roman brickwork. The cemetery around it is indecently neglected, and bones, which should be buried, strew the ground. Baring-Gould (1863) gives an account of its chasubles and other ecclesiastical frippery, which may still be there, unless sold to some traveller. It is a lineal descendant of that “church which in an almost miraculous manner escaped the general conflagration” of 1724-30. Henderson adds the question, “Who knows but the effectual fervent prayer of some pious individual, or some designs of mercy, may have been the cause fixed in the eternal purpose of Jehovah for the preservation of this edifice?” I may simply remark that lava does not flow up hill; the stream split into two at the base of the mound, without “being inspired with reverence for the consecrated ground,” and united in the hollow farther down. Yet travellers of that age derided the Neapolitan who placed his Madonna in front of the flowing lava; and when she taught him the lesson of Knútr (Canute) the Dane,[163] tossed her into the fire with a ‘naccia l’anima tua, etc., etc., etc. Superstition differs not in kind, but only in degree.
The reason for the tent-pitching soon appeared. The burly farmer has a lot of lubberly sons, and two surly daughters; “Cross-patch” and “Crumpled-horn” being attended by half-a-dozen suitors and women friends, bouches inutiles all. If we look into the kitchen, these Lucretias make a general bolt. There is extra difficulty in getting hot-water, although Nature, as “Reykjahlíð” shows, has laid it on hard by; and even the cold element is brought to us in tumblers. The coffee is copiously flooded; this is feminine economy, which looks forward to the same pay for the bad as for the good; and cups, which suggest “take a ’poon, pig,” poorly supply the place of the pot. One of the sons speaks a little English: we tried him upon the lake, and after two hours’ rowing he was utterly exhausted. Besides, there are lots of loafers, jolter-headed, crop-eared youngsters,
“With no baird to the face
Nor a snap to the eyes,”
who are mighty at doing nothing: they peep into, and attempt to enter, the tent; when driven off they lounge away to the smithy, or to the carpenter’s bench, and satisfied with this amount of exercise, they lounge back into the house, where we hear them chattering and wrangling, cursing and swearing, like a nest of young parrots. They remind me of the Maori proverb, “Your people are such lazy rogues, that if every dirt-heap were a lizard, no one would take the trouble to touch its tail and make it run away.” They cannot even serve themselves: the harder work is done by a pauper couple, a blind man and his wife, who sleep in the hay-loft. The only sign of activity is shown by the carpenter, Arngrímr, a surly fellow, wearing a fur cap, like a man from the Principalities, and with mustachioes meeting his whiskers, like those of the Spanish Torero. “He is Nature’s artist,” says the student, meaning that he has taught himself to paint, and hélas! to play flute and fiddle. So the evening ends with ditties, dolefully sung, and the Icelandic national hymn, the latter suggesting Rule (or rather be Ruled) Britannia. We are curious to know how all these sturdy idlers live. They fish; they eat rye-bread and Skýr; they rob the nests, and at times they kill a few birds: the best thing that could happen to them would be shipment to Milwaukee, where they would learn industry under a Yankee taskmaster. I have drawn this unpleasant interior with Dutch minuteness: it is the worst known to me in Iceland.
The old farmer, Pètur Jónsson, lost no time in deserving the character which he has gained from a generation of travellers; his excuse is that he must plunder the passing stranger in order to fill the enormous gapes which characterise his happy home. Yet he makes money as a blacksmith; he owns a hundred sheep, and he is proprietor of a good farm. In his old billycock, his frock-coat and short waistcoat, he looks from head to foot the lower order of Jew; we almost expect to hear “ole clo’” start spontaneously from his mouth. He began by asking $3, to be paid down, for the Krafla trip, and $4, the hire of four labouring men, for trinkgeld to the Fremrinámar; and the manner was more offensive than the matter of the demand. His parting bill was a fine specimen of its kind. It is only fair to state that he bears a very bad name throughout the island.
Next day the north wind still blew; the heavy downpour at five A.M. became a drizzle two hours later; and at ten A.M. there was a blending of sunshine and mistcloud, which showed that we had nought to fear save a shower or two of rain and sleet. Mr Lock (fils) and I determined upon a ride to the Fremrinámar; “a field of sulphur and boiling mud,” says Baring-Gould, “not visited by travellers, as it is difficult of access, and inferior in interest to the Námar-fjall springs.” After breakfast, we set out, each provided with two nags, which we drove over the lava-field to the Vogar farm, about half-an-hour distant on the other side of the grassy point, Höfði. This “oasis in the lava”—a description which applies to all the farms of Eastern Mý-vatn—was the parsonage in Ólafsson’s day (1772); we expected to find the Jón Jónsson mentioned by Shepherd, who had learned English in Scotland—he had, however, joined il numero dei più. As sometimes happens to the over-clever, we notably “did” ourselves; the owner, Hjálmar Helgason, a very civil man over a tass of brandy, was, we afterwards found out, a son-in-law of old Pètur; he also, doubtless informed of the rixe, demanded $4, which we had to pay; he kept us waiting a whole hour whilst the horses were being driven in, and he sent with us a raw laddie, whose only anxiety was to finish the job.
Shortly after noon we rode forward, crossing the unimportant Gjá, which the map stretches in a zigzag south of Reykjahlíð; we passed the “horrid lava-track” of Ólafsson, a mild mixture of clinker and sand, and in twenty minutes we reached Hverfjall, lying to the south-east. From afar the huge black decapitated cone, symmetrically shaped and quaquaversally streaked, has a sinister and menacing look. It is not mentioned by Henderson, whose account of the Mý-vatn is very perfunctory. According to Baring-Gould, it is “built up of shale and dust, and has never erupted lava:” as the name shows, it contained a Hver, or mudspring. We mounted it in ten minutes, and found the big bowl to consist of volcanic cinder and ashes based upon Palagonite and mud: the shape was somewhat like that of the Hauranic “Gharáreh” which supplied the lava of the Lejá. The aneroid (28·70; thermometer, 83°) showed some 800 feet above Reykjahlíð; and the vantage-ground gave an excellent view of the lake, with its low black holms and long green islets, of which the longest and the greenest is Miklaey (mickle isle). This Monte nuovo was erupted in 1748-52; and a plaited black mound in the easily-reached centre shows where the mud was formerly ejected. Almost due south of it lies a precisely similar feature, the Villíngafjall. These formations are technically called Sand-gýgr, “sand craters,” opposed to Eld-gýgr, the “fire abyss;” and their outbreaks form the “sand summers” and the “sand winters” of arenaceous Iceland and its neighbourhood. I look upon the Hverfjall as the typical pseudo-volcanic formation of the island.
The real start was at one P.M., when, having rounded the western wall of the Hverfjall, we passed east of a broken line of craters based upon thin-growing grass. The whole can be galloped over, but ’ware holes! Nor did I find the skirt of a lava-flood always an “unsurmountable barrier to Iceland ponies,” although in new places it may be. On the east was Búrfell (“byre” hill), the name is frequently given to steep, circular, and flat-topped mounds; south-west of it lay the Hvannfell, long and box-shaped. Farther to the south-west, and nearly due south of the lake, rose Sellandarfjall, apparently based on flat and sandy ground; patches of snow streaked the hogsback, which distinguished itself from the horizontal lines of its neighbours. Far ahead towered the steely heights of Bláfjall, which from the east had appeared successively a cone and a bluff: it still showed the snows which, according to travellers, denote that the Sprengisandur is impassable; the last night had added to them, but the lower coating soon melted in the fiery sun-bursts. The line of path was fresh lava overlying Palagonite; and in the hollows dwarf pillars of black clay were drawn up from the snow by solar heat: their regular and polygonal forms again suggested doubts about the igneous origin of basalt, which may simply result from shrinking and pressure. This columnar disposal of dried clay, and even of starch desiccated in cup or basin, was noticed by Uno Von Troil as far back as 1770.
After an hour’s sharp ride, during which my little mare often rested on her nose, we struck a cindery divide, a scene of desolation with sandy nullahs, great gashes, down whose sharp slopes we were accompanied bodily by a fair proportion of the side: of course the ascents were made on foot. The material is all volcanic and Palagonitic; here trap and trachyte in situ apparently do not exist: as we made for a Brèche de Roland, east of Bláfjall, we passed a sloping wall of white clay; and at half-past three we halted and changed nags at the Afréttr (compascuum), to which the neighbouring farmers drive their sheep in July and August. The lad called it the Laufflesjar, leafy green spots in the barren waste. We saw little of the willow which he had led us to expect; but the dark sand abounded in flowers and gramens; the former represented by the white bloom of the milfoil (Achillea millefolium), which the people term Vallhumall,[164] or “Welsh,” that is, “foreign,” hop; and the latter by the Korn-Súra (Polygonum viviparum), viviparous Alpine buckwheat. A snow-patch at the western end of the plainlet gave us drink; and thus water, forage, and fuel were all to be found within a few hundred yards. The guide said it was half-way, whereas it is nearly two-thirds, and we rode back to it from Bláfjall, which bears 100° (mag.), in an hour.