The students had all left us, and here our now pleasant party broke up. The bishop’s daughter and her two friends had the choice of riding some twenty miles round the Skagafjörð head, or of crossing it by boat, an easy process which, however, did not seem to have charms for them. We bade affectionate farewell to Síra Guttormr, whose beat is from Rípr (the crag) in Helganes to Keta near the north-eastern extremity of the Húnavatn peninsula—he seems to look upon it as a mean place. The reverend has no pay, properly so called, and his “living” is expressed by the contributions of his parishioners: truly a man must have a vocation for such a life!
Late in the afternoon the “Jón” turned his head northwards, and on July 6 steamed into Reykjavik harbour. We shook hands with our excellent captain, and heartily wished him every success, and bade an adieu which was destined to be an au revoir.
CHAPTER XI.
TO HEKLA AND THE GEYSIR IN HAUKADALR.[87]
This is indeed a Cockney trip, but a visit to Iceland without it would be much like Dante’s Commedia with the Inferno omitted.
Section I.—To Krísuvík, the Western Sulphur-field.
Mr Chapman and I determined to secure comparative novelty by a “hysteron proteron,” beginning with the “Cope” and ending with the Gusher and the Thingplain Lake.
We hastily collected the small quantity of harnoys de gueule absolutely required—man eats less when travelling, and more when voyaging. Our stores represented a ham, one serving for one mouth per month; a couple of sausages, to be avoided when thirst is threatened; four loaves of rye-bread (each 6 lbs. = one man per week); snuff, cigars, and pigtail for friendship; small change for £5; and, lastly, two mighty kegs of schnapps, the load of one-twelfth our carriage. The Fylgjumaðr (leader) was Paudl (Páll) Eyúlfsson, before mentioned as the “French guide;” our Lestamaðr (“last” driver) was “Smalls,” alias Sigrbjörn Björnsson, fourteen years old, and four feet nothing: we are careful to see that they do not monopolise the very best of the eight riding-horses. We ourselves at once become Martednn (Marteinn) Kaupmansson and Ríkarður Burtonsson; and thus having borrowed as much local colouring as possible, we leave, nothing loath, the hard-soft bosom of semi-civilisation.
Spurring hotly over ground now familiar (July 8, 1872), we delayed a few minutes at Foss-vogr to inspect the “sedimentary and sandstone stratifications,” found so interesting by older travellers in a purely volcanic island. They suggested, in early times, to daring spirits that granite might not be Plutonic, and they made the devil-may-care doubt even the eruptive origin of basalt. The travels of Von Waltershausen have settled Foss-vogr and its Palagonite.
There was nothing to keep us at Hafnafjörð, after a longing glance at the “Jón Sigurðsson,” which lay in harbour. A man happened to mention that the one herd of reindeer still haunting this part of the island had been lately seen; it was not our fate to sight them.
At four P.M. we inspected the Kaldá—an exceptional feature. Rising from a little tarn in the northern flank of the lone hill Helgafell, it winds westward down a shapely river-valley. Half of the stream suddenly disappears in a hollow of the right bank, a little below the farm crossed by the high road or path, and the remainder follows suit about two miles farther down. The feature suggested a limitation of the accepted dictum, “Calcareous rocks are almost the only ones in which great caverns and long winding passages are found.” This is true of water-made passages, where carbonic acid has dissolved the limestone; the cooling of the upper lava crust has the same effect in Plutonic formations. The course of the Kaldá is very badly traced in the great map; nor does the latter show where the lower stream reappears.