The visit of the two engineers, Messrs Shields & Gale, has also been elsewhere alluded to. Finally, Mr R. M. Smith informs me that the prospects of the Krísuvík diggings now look brighter. The project of tramways, or locomotives, seems to have been abandoned in favour of carts and ponies plying on a good road, about sixteen miles long, between the Sulphur Mountain and Hafnafjörð.
Section II.—To Hekla, and up It.
The next morning’s work began with a path which introduced us to the mud-bog, as opposed to the turf-bog. This pleasant feature led to lava, whose three main torrents and many secondary streamlets could be seen spilling over the trap wall of Lángahlíð. There were the two normal kinds, the soft and cindery, caverned and friable, which makes good paths: it degrades to the dark red and yellow-red humus which is here, as in the Haurán, the general colour of the ground. This variety is clad with two lichens; the grey with black scutella (L. calcareus?), and the pure white (L. Tartareus?) which makes the ejections of the Safá near Damascus simulate limestone. The other is intensely hard, ruddy black or brown-grey, and in places solid as if poured out yesterday; the reason generally given is the presence of olivine in this trachytic or silicious form. M. Durocher’s theory is, that being lighter than the doleritic and augitic (basic), it therefore floats separately, and thus he would explain how lava floods of different composition may proceed from the same locality.[93] The plications of this hard lava, looking as if hogs-heads of honey had been poured upon stone, the domes and the drops, not to speak of the sharp-toothed mouths and crevasses, make the traveller suffer for the sufferings of his nag.
At the end of the first great lava-stream was the farm of Herdísarvík; now not a “vik” but a “vatn”—we looked around for sulphur, but in vain. Hard by our right the fierce seas burst and roared upon a coast cruel and harbourless as that of Kafir-land; whilst in the smooth distance a few catspaws suggested shoaly islets. The Hlíðarvatn (lithe or slope water) is not like its neighbour a misnomer, but the supply is brackish, ebbing and flowing with the tide, like wells in the valley of the Thames. The only birds seen were wild geese, crees, gulls, curlews, young snipes, and ravens which especially affect this warm part of the island. During the halt we especially noticed a number of web-less hunting spiders, whose little nests were full of young—the peasants still preserve the old Köngur-váfa (web-weaver) which the citizens hold obsolete, preferring Könguló or Konguló. There are spider-stories, too, like the Gold Coast “Anansesem;” a small red species, for instance, kills when it bites.
From Litlaland, which we reached whilst the sun was still high, we enjoyed a pleasant view. Beyond the rise of Thorlakshöfn lie the “Irish Islands,” tall and picturesque, fronted by the great alluvial plain of south-western Iceland. It has been called Tempe, Arcadia, and Vale of Enna, though utterly unlike the grim defile of Peneus, the stern limestone mounts of the Peloponnesus, and the waterless slopes of Sicily. The “Pastorale in A flat,” as Thomas Hood, sen., would have called it, a raw northern facsimile of the Lagos Lagoon, as it appeared to me, gains dignity by the eastern background of eternal snows, the flat top of Eyjafjall, the long ridge of Tindafjall, and the sharp point of Torfajökull. And it is “classic ground.” From a commanding site we can prospect Ingolfsfjall, where Iceland’s first settler is supposed to be buried, and the Bergthórshvoll farm in the delta of the Markarfljót; behind it lies Hlíðarendi, where the “peerless Gunnar” sleeps in the Tverá Holm.[94]
There is—for Iceland—rare pathos in this description of the hero’s tomb.
“They cast a cairn over Gunnar, and made him sit upright in the cairn.”
“He sang in the cairn which opened, and he turned himself and looked at the moon, which was shining clear and bright. And men thought they saw four lights burning in the cairn, and none of them cast a shadow. He sang a song, after which the cairn was shut up again.”
The next morning led us to Reykir. As we rode up the valley of the Ölfusá we could mark the features of the scene. In front the river was a lake, and the green expanse of the water-veined delta was scattered over with south-facing farms, not acknowledged by Gunnlaugsson and Olsen. Eyrarbakki, so called from the host of islets which line the shore, is the only port till Berufjörð on the eastern coast, and it was wholly occupied by two ships. Mr William Hogarth of Aberdeen, who owned the establishment, has not been here, we were told, for years; lately, however, some English visitors had excellent fishing in the river, and were hospitably entertained by Hr Thorgrimsson, agent to M. Lefolii, a Danish merchant. All this greenery was set off by the barrenness of the buttressed Lángahlíð hard on our left. The regular horizon of trap-wall had been succeeded by a sharp slope of Palagonite conglomerate, which evidently underlies the whole block. On the summit is a desert where no man dwells, broken by pyramids which are evidently lava-cones, Skálafell (scald or bald hill?) being the chief feature; upon the lips of the plateau are gushes of modern lava, and on the low levels appears an ancient sea-beach, scattered with rounded blocks like giant rocs’ eggs.