General direction, east and by north to west and by south.
Weather fine and clear like yesterday. Sun now sets at 10 P.M., and air grows cold. Find people strolling at midnight. Dust in Reykjavik very bad.
| Expenses of Trip for Two Travellers. | |
| Guide (10 days at $2, 3m. 0sk.), | $25 0 0 |
| Boy (10 days at $1, 3m. 0sk.), | 15 0 0 |
| Returning horses to owners, | 4 3 0 |
| Hire of pack-saddles and boxes, | 7 0 0 |
| Twelve horses (at $1 per diem), | 120 0 0 |
| Total, | $171 3 0 |
The extras and minor expenses, $27, 2m. 0sk.
Share of each traveller, $104, 2m. 8sk., or £12 for ten days.
CHAPTER XII.
ON HUMAN AND OTHER REMAINS FROM ICELAND.
Shortly after my return to England the following letter was sent to the Anthropological Institute:
“I have the pleasure to forward a small collection of human remains and other articles from Iceland.
“The site of the ‘find’ will readily be found upon the four-sheet map of Gunnlaugsson and Olsen. Cast the eye eastward of the great southern stream ‘Markarfljót,’ mark or forest flood, whose eastern delta-arm debouches nearly opposite to Vestmannaeyjar, Islands of the Irishmen. You will see on the left (east) of the stream the little valley of Thórsmörk, the grove of Thor, a good sturdy old god, whose name still lives and thrives in Iceland. He was even preferred to Odin, ‘Hin Almattki Áss,’ ‘that Almighty Áss,’ by the people of Snowland, and in more modern days he was invoked when a doughty deed was about to be done; the deities of Christianity being preferred only when the more feminine qualities of mildness and mercy were to be displayed.
“The valley in question is described by the ‘Oxonian in Iceland’ as a ‘beautiful green-wooded spot,’ near which flows the Markarfljót. About eight miles long, with precipitous sides, its site is bisected by a narrow but tolerably deep ‘boulder-river,’ a bugbear, by-the-by, of Icelandic travel, and this must be repeatedly forded. The map shows a green patch; the shrubs may average six feet, whilst one monster, a rowan or mountain ash, attains the abnormal altitude of thirty to thirty-six feet. It is one of the tallest, if not the tallest, in the island; the two ‘giant trees’ of Akureyri, which every traveller is in duty bound to admire, do not exceed twenty-five feet.