Resuming our road we rounded the sides of the hillocks, and presently we attacked a Hraun unmarked by Varðas. Discharged by a multitude of little vents, the upper and the lower portions are the most degraded; the middle flood looks quite new, and ropy like twisted straw. We now sighted and smelt the smoke pouring from the yellow lip, which looks as if the sun were ever shining upon its golden surface, and which stands out conspicuous from the slaggy, cindery, and stony hills. At five P.M., after a ride of four hours and a half, we reached the northern or smaller vent, an oval opening to the north-north-west, and we placed our nags under shelter from the wind. The hair was frozen on their backs into “lamellæ niveæ et glaciales spiculæ;” they had no forage beyond a bite at the Afréttr, and we were on a high, bleak level, the aneroid showing 27·10, and the thermometer 40°.
When the sun had doffed his turban of clouds, we sat upon the edge of the Little “Ketill” and studied the site of the Fremrinámar, the “further springs,” because supposed to be most distant from the lake. From the Öræfi the pools seem to cluster about the yellow crater; now we see that they occupy all the eastern slope of the raised ground, the section of the Mý-vatns Sveit extending from Búrfell to Bláfjall. The northern vent is merely one of the dependencies of Hvannfell; the southern or Great Crater belongs to the “Blue Mountain.” We presently turned southwards and ascended the Great Kettle, which Paijkull declares to be “probably the largest in Iceland.” This Námakoll, “head” or “crown of the springs,” is an oval, with the longer diameter disposed north-east to south-west (true), and measuring nearly double the shorter axis (600:350 yards).[165] The outer wall, raised 150 to 200 feet, is one mass of soft sulphur covered by black sand; every footstep gives vent to a curl of smoke, and we do not attempt to count the hissing fumaroles, which are of every size from the thickness of a knitting-needle upwards. With the least pressure a walking-stick sinks two feet. We pick up fragments of gypsum; alum, fibrous and efflorescent; and crystals of lime, white and red, all the produce of the Palagonite, which still forms the inner crust; and we read that sal ammoniac and rock-salt have also been found. The rim is unbroken, for no discharge of lava has taken place; the interior walls are brick-red and saffron-yellow, and where snow does not veil the sole, lies a solid black pudding, the memorial cairn of the defunct Hver or Makkaluber. From the west end no sulphur fumes arise; south-eastward the ruddy suffioni extend to a considerable distance.
The Appendix will describe the old working of these diggings, which did not pay, although the hundredweight cost only ten shillings. At the southern end a staff planted in the ground amongst the hissing hot coppers still shows the labourers’ refuge, a shed built with dry lava blocks. If Professor Henchel characterised them correctly as “bad, because all the sulphur was taken away last year” (1775), they have wonderfully recovered in the course of a century: evidently “all the sulphur” means only the pure yellow flowers lying on the surface. The mass of mineral is now enormous. The road to the lake is a regular and easy slope, and working upon a large scale would give different results from those obtained by filling and selling basketfuls.
From the summit of the Námakoll we had an extensive view of the unknown region to the south. Upon the near ridge stood the Sighvatr rock, the landmark of the Öræfi, from which it appears a regular pyramid: here it assumes the shape of a Beco de papagaio. I now ascertained that there are no northern Dýngjufjöll, or rather that they are wrongly disposed upon the map. I wonder also how that queer elongated horse-shoe farther south, the “Askja” or “Dýngjufjöll hin Syðri,” came to be laid out; but my knowledge of the ground does not enable me to correct the shape. North of Herðubreið lay the Herðubreiðarfell, all blue and snow-white. To the south-west stretched far beyond the visible horizon the Ódáða Hraun, which most travellers translate the “Horrible Lava,” and some “Malefactors’ Desert” or “Lava of Evil Deed.” The area is usually estimated at 1160 square miles, more than one-third the extent of the Vatnajökull, which it prolongs to the north-west. Viewed from the Námakoll it by no means appears a “fearful tract, with mountains standing up almost like islands above a wild, black sea.” I imagine that most of the contes bleues about this great and terrible wilderness take their rise in the legendary fancies of the people touching the Útilegumenn, or outlaws who are supposed to haunt it. I observed that Hr Gíslason prepared a pair of revolvers in case we met them upon the Öxi; and I found to my cost that even educated men believe in them. Previous travellers may be consulted about the Happy Valleys in the stone-desert, the men dressed in red Wadmal, the beautiful women, and the hornshod horses. I can only observe that such a society has now no raison d’être; it might have had reasons to fly its kind, but a few sheep lost during the year are not sufficient proofs of such an anomaly still existing.
All I saw of the Ódáða Hraun was a common lava-field, probably based upon Palagonite. It seemed of old date, judging from the long dust-lines and the stripes tonguing out into ashes and cindery sand. The surface was uneven, but not mountainous; long dorsa striped the ejected matter, and the latter abounded in hollows and ravines, caverns and boilers. Many parts retained the snow even at a low level, and thus water cannot be wholly wanting even in the driest season. Here and there were tracts of greenish tint, probably grass and willows, lichens and mosses; possibly of the lava with bottle-like glaze over which I afterwards rode. The prospect to the south-south-west ended with a blue and white buttress, an outlier of the Vatnajökull, which might be the (Eastern) Skjaldbreið.
We proposed to return by the eastern road viâ the Búrfell, but our guide declared that the lava was almost impassable, and that the hardest work would not take us to Reykjahlíð before the morning. Having neither food, tobacco, nor liquor, and being half frozen by the cold, we returned viâ the Afréttr; we passed to the east of Hverfjall, not gaining by the change of path; and after a ride of eight hours and a half we found ourselves “at home” shortly before eleven P.M. My feet did not recover warmth till three A.M.
August 9th was an idle day for the horses, which required rest before a long march to the wilderness; the weather also was rainy, and more threatening than ever. I proceeded to examine the Hlíðarnámar, or Ledge-springs, and to see what boring work had been done by my companions.[166] The “smell of rotten eggs,” the effects of “suffocating fumes” upon “respiratory organs,” which by the by can only benefit from them, and the chance of being “snatched from a yawning abyss by the stalwart arms of the guide”—we were our own guides—had now scanty terrors for our daring souls. They have been weighty considerations with some travellers; their attitude reminds me of two Alpine climbers who, instead of crossing it, sat down and debated whether, as fathers of families, they would be justified in attempting that snow-bridge. Perhaps the conviction that the “abyss” here rarely exceeds in depth three feet, where it meets with the ground-rock, Palagonite, may account for our exceptional calmness. The reader will note that I speak only of the Hlíðarnámar: in 1874 they tell me a traveller was severely scalded at some hot spring.
The Hlíðarnámar west of the Námafjall, which Henderson calls the “Sulphur Mountain,” are on a lower plane than the Námar proper, east of the divide. They are bounded on the north by the double lava-stream which, during the last century, issued from the north-east, near the base of the Hlíðarfjall: to the south stretch independent “stone-floods,” studded with a multitude of hornitos, little vents, and foci. The area of our fragment of the great solfatara extending from the mountain, where it is richest, to the lava which has burnt it out, may be one square mile. It is not pretty scenery save to the capitalist’s eye, this speckled slope of yellow splotches, set in dark red and chocolate-coloured bolus, here and there covered with brown gravel, all fuming and puffing, and making the delicate and tender-hued Icelandic flora look dingy as a S’a Leone mulatto.
We began with the lowlands, where the spade, deftly plied by the handy Bowers, threw up in many places flowers of sulphur, and almost pure mineral. Below the gold-tinted surface we generally found a white layer, soft, acid, and mixed with alum; under this again occurred the bright red, the chocolate, and other intermediate colours, produced either by molecular change, the result of high temperature; or by oxygen, which the steam and sulphur have no longer power to modify. Here the material was heavy and viscid, clogging the spade. Between the yellow outcrops stretched gravelly tracts, which proved to be as rich as those of more specious appearance. Many of the issues were alive, and the dead vents were easily resuscitated by shallow boring; in places a puff and fizz immediately followed the removal of the altered lava blocks which cumbered the surface. In places we crushed through the upper crust, and thus “falling in” merely means dirtying the boots. Mr Augustus Völlker, I am told, has determined the bright yellow matter to be almost pure (95·68:100). The supply, which has now been idle for thirty years, grows without artificial aid, but the vast quantities which now waste their sourness on the desert air, and which deposit only a thin superficial layer, might be collected by roofing the vents with pans, as in Mexico, or by building plank sheds upon the lava blocks, which appear already cut for masonry. According to the old traveller, Ólafsson, the supply is readily renewed; and Dr Mouat (“The Andaman Islanders”) covers all the waste in two or three years.
Leaving our nags in a patch of wild oats, which, they say, the Devil planted to delude man, we walked up the Námafjall, whose white, pink, and yellow stripes proved to be sulphur-stones and sand washed down by the rain so as to colour the red oxidised clay. Here we picked up crystals of alum and lime, and fragments of selenite and gypsum converted by heat into a stone-like substance. The several crests, looking like ruined towers from below, proved to be box-shaped masses of Palagonite and altered lava; the summits, not very trustworthy to the tread, gave comprehensive prospects of the lowlands and the lake. Upon the chine we also found mud-springs, blubbering, gurgling, spluttering, plop-plopping, and mud-flinging, as though they had been bits of the Inferno: the feature is therefore not confined, as some writers assert, to the hill-feet facing the Öræfi. The richest diggings begin east of the crest, and here the vapour escapes with a treble of fizz and a bass of sumph, which the vivid fancy of the Icelandic traveller has converted into a “roar.” My companions were much excited by the spectacle of the great soufrière, and by the thought of so much wealth lying dormant in these days of “labour activised by capital,” when sulphur, “the mainstay,” says Mr Crookes, “of our present industrial chemistry,” has risen from £4, 10s. to £7 a ton, when 15 to 20 per cent. is a paying yield in the Sicilian mines, and when the expensive old system of working the ore has been rendered simple and economical as charcoal-burning. And we should have looked rather surprised if informed that all these mines were shortly to be extinguished by a scientific member of the Society of Arts.