“lies at peace with all his humble race,
And has no stone to mark his burial-place.”
It was the usual reverse of gardenesque or picturesque. Sheep grazed upon the weeds that “had no business there,” and the railings were utilised for drying socks and small-clothes.
The fourth march proved peculiarly unpleasant. When the weather is bad at Reykjavik, here it is detestable. The display of water-works seemed the effort of the old Polynesian giants, who submerged the greater part of earth—Terrible-rain, Long-continued-rain, Fierce-hailstorm, and their progeny, Mist, Heavy-dew, and Light-dew. In plain English it was a “jolly wet day.” The horses very sensibly bolted up stream, and refused to be caught till noon, when the men returned dripping as loons or roaches. The delta of the two great streams is said to be, in fine weather, one of the fairest pastoral scenes the island can show; but we saw it at its worst, sadly deformed, and we gathered practical experience of what a few hours of downfall can do in this semi-saturated region. The paths were “dead,” or rather, they were shown only by lines of puddle; the sloughs and quagmires admitted our ponies to the hocks; the drains overflowed like little hill-races, and the labour of rounding the deeper fens was immense. A few peaks which lay but a little distance to the north seemed immeasurably removed, like
“Far-off mountains turnèd into clouds.”
About mid-afternoon we came upon the Thjórsá, “fluviorum rex Eridanus” of Iceland: even at this upper part it looked like an estuary, split by sandbars, piles of basalt, sandbars and basalt again. We pushed hard over the few good places; and moist, mouldy, and malcontent, we were right glad to find ourselves in the strangers’ room of the ferryman’s house: 20 feet long by 14 broad and 7 high: dated 1848, it was an omnium gatherum of the family goods, and it boasted of one four-paned window, which has never opened, and which never will. The features denoting wealth were huge wooden lockers, like seamen’s chests, of bright colours, painted with flowers and arabesques of still brighter tints: I could not but remember the pea-green and gamboge box which carried to Meccah the drugs of a certain “Haji Abdullah.” The soiree ended with a distressing banality. Fair visions of girls who kiss the stranger on the mouth, who relieve him of his terminal garments, and who place a brandy bottle under his pillow, and a bowl of milk or cream by his side, where are ye? Icelanders have allowed their pleasant primitive fashions to be laughed away by the jeering stranger, who little thought how much the custom told in favour of the hosts. The naïve modesty of antiquity, when Nestor’s youngest daughter laved, anointed, and dressed Telemachus, and when the maids of Penelope had a less pleasant task with the elderly Ulysses, has departed with the public bathings, in angelic attire, of Iceland, of Sind, and of Japan, and the kiss given to the guest by the young wife or the eldest daughter of the Morlacchi house. This sublime impudeur was possible only amongst a pure race: the sneers of a single civilised savage suffice to demolish this “heureuse absence du ‘schoking.’”
Next morning, while the horses were grazing, we ascertained that the farm had its therma: a jet of steam issuing from the ground near the river had been turfed over, with room to stand; and thus a Turkish, or rather a Russian, bath was possible on bath-day. We then walked down to the Thjórsá, an especially grisly spectacle. Its breadth, 250 yards, was occupied by white glacier water, with a sulphury tinge, rendered more ghastly by the black sand, rocks, and islets studding the bed above and below the ferry. The right bank showed a wall of conglomerate, and on both sides “cachociras” dashing over the stones gave pleasant reminiscences of San Francisco. The left bank is of Hekla lava, either compact or very porous containing crystals of lime. We found a natural hatchet and quantities of pumice, many-coloured, but mostly yellow: it floats in water, and it is useful for holystoning the skin. The velocity was three knots, and the temperature 52° (F). The ferry creeps up from the stone-head acting pier on the right bank, swings across below the break, and lands you in water on the far side.
The conduct of ponies at the ferry is always amusing. They are driven in by the shouts of lads and lasses, by tossings and wavings of the arms, by sticks and stones, and by the barking and biting of curs. They sidle, jostle, step in daintily, smell the water, and, after trembling on the brink for a time, some plucky little nag takes the lead. He is followed by the ruck, but there are often cowards ready to hark back: these must be forced on with renewal of stick and stone, and by driving those that have crossed up and down the bank. In dangerous narrow beds, it is often necessary to tow over shirkers one by one with a rope. The swimmers gallantly breast the flood, which breaks upon their crests; and they paddle with heads always up stream, dilated eyes and nostrils snorting like young hippopotami; the best always carry the back high. As they reach the far end, they wade slowly to shore, and fall at once to grazing. They took four minutes thirty seconds to cross the Thjórsá, and as usual they were drifted far down.
We then pricked fast over the little pampa which lies between the Thjórsá and the Hekla-foot, making, I know not why, for Stóruvellir. Here we were received by Síra Guðmundr Jónsson, a gentlemanly man, who has accompanied several travellers, notably the “Oxonian,” up the volcano; he showed the Iceland peculiarity of “walking the quarter-deck;” and his handsome blue-eyed daughter wore the sternest of looks, apparently engendered by semi-solitude. He indulged in wild archery about the dangers of the climb, which, over biscuits and coffee, sounded truly awful. After leaving the parsonage, we enjoyed our first fair view of Hekla: during the earlier ride it had been buried in clouds, and hidden by the chapel block, Skarðfjall.
The Hekla of our ingenuous childhood, when we believed in the “Seven Wonders of the World,” was a mighty cone, a “pillar of heaven,” upon whose dreadful summit white, black, and sanguine red lay in streaks and patches, with volumes of sooty smoke and lurid flames, and a pitchy sky. The whole was somewhat like the impossible illustrations of Vesuvian eruptions, in body-colours, plus the ice proper to Iceland. The Hekla of reality, No. 5 in the island scale,[97] is a commonplace heap, half the height of Hermon, and a mere pigmy compared with the Andine peaks, rising detached from the plains; about three and a half miles in circumference, backed by the snows of Tindafjall and Torfajökull, and supporting a sky-line that varies greatly with the angle under which it is seen. Travellers usually make it a three-horned Parnassus, with the central knob highest—which is not really the case. From the south-west, it shows now four, then five, distinct points; the north-western lip of the northern crater, which hides the true apex; the south-western lip of the same; the north-eastern lip of the southern crater, which appears the culminating point, and the two eastern edges of the southern bowls. A pair of white patches represents the “eternal snows.” On the right of the picture is the steep, but utterly unimportant, Thríhyrningr, crowned with its bench-mark; to the left, the Skarðsfjall, variegated green and black; and in the centre, the Bjólfell, a western buttress of the main building, which becomes alternately a saddleback, a dorsum, and an elephant’s head, trunk, and shoulders.
We came upon the valley of the Western Rángá[98] at a rough point, a gash in the hard yellow turf-clad clay, dotted with rough lava blocks, and with masses of conglomerate, hollowed, turned, and polished by water: the shape was a succession of S, and the left side was the more tormented. Above the ford a dwarf cascade had been formed by the lava of ’45, which caused the waters to boil, and below the ford jumped a second, where the stream forks. We then entered an Iceland “forest,” at least four feet high; the “chapparal” was composed of red willow (Salix purpurea), of Grá-viðir, woolly-leaved willow (Salix lapponum),[99] the “tree under which the Devil flayed the goats”—a diabolical difficulty, when the bush is a foot high—and the awful and venerable birch,[100] “la demoiselle des fôrets,” which has so often “blushed with patrician blood.” About mid-afternoon we reached Næfrholt (birch-bark hill),[101] the “fashionable” place for the ascent, and we at once inquired for the guide. Upon the carpe diem principle, he had gone to Reykjavik with the view of drinking his late gains; but we had time to organise another, and even alpenstocks with rings and spikes are to be found at the farm-house. Everything was painfully tourist.