SIR RICHARD F. BURTON
On the eastern slope of the Frachytic pile and extending round the north of the rock-wall are the Hvers and Geysirs. Nothing can be meaner than their appearance, especially to the tourist who travels as usual from Reykjavik; nothing more ridiculous than the contrast of this pin’s point, this atom of pyritic formation, with the gigantic theory which it was held to prove, earth’s central fire, the now obsolete dream of classical philosophers and “celebrated academicians”; nothing more curious than the contrast between Nature and Art, between what we see in life and what we find in travellers’ illustrations. Sir John Stanley, perpetuated by Henderson, first gave consistence to the popular idea of “that most wonderful fountain, the Great Geysir;” such is the character given to it by the late Sir Henry Holland, a traveller who belonged to the “wunderbar” epoch of English travel, still prevalent in Germany. From them we derive the vast background of black mountain, the single white shaft of fifty feet high, domed like the popular pine-tree of Vesuvian smoke, the bouquet of water, the Prince of Wales feathers, double-plumed and triple-plumed, charged with stones; and the minor jets and side squirts of the foreground, where pigmies stand and extend the arm of illustration and the hand of marvel.
On this little patch, however, we may still study the seven forms of Geysir life. First, is the baby still sleeping in the bosom of Mother Earth, the airy wreath escaping from the hot clay ground; then comes the infant breathing strongly, and at times puking in the nurse’s lap; third, is the child simmering with impatience; and fourth, is the youth whose occupation is to boil over. The full-grown man is represented by the “Great Gusher” in the plenitude of its lusty power; old age, by the tranquil, sleepy “laug”; and second childhood and death, mostly from diphtheria or quinsy, in the empty red pits strewed about the dwarf plain. “Patheticum est!” as the old scholiast exclaimed.
It is hardly fair to enter deeply in the history of the Great Geysir, but a few words may be found useful. The silence of Ari Fródi (A. D., 1075), and of the Landnámabók, so copious in its details, suggests that it did not exist in the Eleventh Century; and the notice of Saxo Grammaticus in the preface to his History of Denmark proves that it had become known before the end of the Thirteenth. Hence it is generally assumed that the volcanic movements of A. D., 1294, which caused the disappearance of many hot springs, produced those now existing. Forbes clearly proved the growth of the tube by deposition of silex on the lips; a process which will end by sealing the spring: he placed its birth about 1060 years ago, which seems to be thoroughly reasonable; and thus for its manhood we have a period of about six centuries.
In 1770 the Geyser spouted eleven times a day; in 1814 it erupted every six hours; and in 1872 once between two and a week. Shepherd vainly wasted six days; a French party seven; and there are legends of a wasted fortnight.
Remains now only to walk over the ground, which divides itself into four separate patches: the extinct, to the north-west, below and extending round the north of the Laugarfjall buttress; the Great Geysir; the Strokkr and the Thikku-hverar to the south.
In the first tract earth is uniformly red, oxidized by air, not as in poetical Syria by the blood of Adonis. The hot, coarse bolus, or trachytic clay, soft and unctuous, astringent, and adhering to the tongue is deposited in horizontal layers, snowy-white, yellow-white, ruddy, light-blue, blue-grey, mauve, purple, violet, and pale-green are the Protean tints; often mixed and mottled, the effect of alum, sulphuric acid, and the decomposition of bisulphide of iron. The saucer of the Great Geysir is lined with Geysirite (silica hydraté), beads or tubercles of grey-white silica; all the others want these fungi or coral-like ornaments. The dead and dying springs show only age-rusty moulds and broken-down piles, once chimneys and ovens, resembling those of Reykir, now degraded and deformed to countless heaps of light and dark grey. Like most of the modern features, they drained to the cold rivulet on the east, and eventually to the south. The most interesting feature is the Blesi (pronounced Blese), which lies 160 feet north of the Great Geysir. This hot-water pond, a Grotto Azurra, where cooking is mostly done, lies on a mound, and runs in various directions. To the north it forms a dwarf river-valley flowing west of the Great Geysir; eastward it feeds a hole of bubbling water which trickles in a streak of white sinter to the eastern rivulet and a drip-hole, apparently communicating underground with an ugly little boiler of grey-brown, scum-streaked, bubbling mud, foul-looking as a drain. The “beautiful quiescent spring” measures forty feet by fifteen,[11] and is of reniform or insect shape, the waist being represented by a natural arch of stone spanning the hot blue depths below the stony ledges which edge them with scallops and corrugations. Hence the name; this bridge is the “blaze” streaking a pony’s face. Blesi was not sealed by deposition of silex; it suddenly ceased to erupt in A. D., 1784, the year after the Skaptár convulsion, a fact which suggests the origin of the Geysirs. It is Mackenzie’s “cave of blue water”; and travellers who have not enjoyed the lapis lazuli of the Capri grotto, indulge in raptures about its colouration. North-west of the Blesi, and distant 200 feet, is another ruin, situated on a much higher plane and showing the remains of a large silicious mould: it steams, but the breath of life comes feebly and irregularly. This is probably the “Roaring Geysir” or the “Old Geysir,” which maps and plans place eighty yards from the Great Geysir.
The Great Geysir was unpropitious to us, yet we worked hard to see one of its expiring efforts. An Englishman had set up a pyramid at the edge of the saucer, and we threw in several hundredweights, hoping that the silex, acted upon by the excessive heat, might take the effect of turf; the only effects were a borborygmus which sounded somewhat like B’rr’rr’t, and a shiver as if the Foul Fiend had stirred the depths. The last eruption was described to us as only a large segment of the tube, not exceeding six feet in diameter. About midnight the veteran suffered slightly from singultus. On Monday the experts mispredicted that he would exhibit between 8 and 9 A. M., and at 1 A. M. on Tuesday there was a trace of second-childhood life. After the usual eructation, a general bubble, half veiled in white vapour, rose like a gigantic glass-shade from the still surface, and the troubled water trickled down the basin sides in miniature boiling cascades. There it flowed eastwards by a single waste-channel which presently forms a delta of two arms, the base being the cold, rapid, and brawling rivulet; the northern fork has a dwarf “force,” used as a douche, and the southern exceeds it in length, measuring some 350 paces.
We were more fortunate with the irascible Strokkr, whose name has been generally misinterpreted. Dillon calls it the piston, or “churning-staff”; and Barrow the “shaker”: it is simply the “hand-churn” whose upright shaft is worked up and down—the churn-like column of water suggested the resemblance. This feature, perhaps the “New Geysir” of Sir John Stanley and Henderson, formerly erupted naturally, and had all the amiable eccentricity of youth: now it must be teased or coaxed. Stanley gave it 130 feet of jet, or 36 higher than the Great Geysir; Henderson 50 to 80; Symington, 100 to 150 feet; Bryson, “upwards of a hundred”; and Baring-Gould, “rather higher than the Geysir.” We found it lying 275 feet (Mackenzie 131 yards) south of the big brother, of which it is a mean replica. The outer diameter of the saucer is only seven feet, the inner about eighteen; and it is too well drained by its silex-floored channel ever to remain full.
The most interesting part to us was the fourth or southern tract. It is known as the Thikku-hverar, thick caldrous (hot springs), perhaps in the sense opposed to thin or clear water. Amongst its “eruptiones flatuum,” the traveller feels that he is walking