—Southey.
The present house at Haukagill is finished inside with unpainted spruce from Norway, beautiful as old mahogany, having become soft reddish brown with age and frequent polishing with fine sand. Our bed chamber contained the pride of the family, a Connecticut clock adjusted to strike the hours and the quarters. Its gong was far from musical. The bells of Bruges had raised havoc with our sleep with their persistent struggle to be heard, but this clock, on a shelf at the head of the bed, reminded us every fifteen minutes that it also came from New England as well as we and was clamorous for recognition. After hours of sleeplessness we wished it had never left the Nutmeg State.
At nine in the morning we turned our backs upon this charming valley, climbed the steep hill and looked down at the farm house, the last we were to see for two days. We were now fairly upon the great plain of Grimstungaheiði, Grim’s-Tongue-Heath, an extensive tract of desolation between the fertile valleys of the north and the glaciers of the great central plateau of Iceland. For a while there was a trace of a trail which soon disappeared. Hour after hour we plodded on, guided solely by the glimmer of the glaciers on the horizon and an occasional tumbled-down cairn of former days.
This tract is a broad and fresh moraine from the recently receded glacier, chaotic, empty, vast and dreary. There is nothing to relieve the monotony of the scene save the increasing mass of ice as the glaciers loom higher above the stony horizon. The angular fragments of lava, somber, gray, variously riven and confusedly hurled in piles, are as though some vast mountain had been crumpled like an eggshell and the fragments scattered by a titanic hand. No touch of verdure enlivens the cold ruin and weary waste, save at the margins of the numerous ponds and pools which glimmer like sheets of light in the dim distance. Otherwise, everything everywhere is like everything everywhere else. This heath is similar to the vast interior of Iceland, except that the traces of vegetation found here are often entirely wanting throughout large sections, notably north of Hoffs Jökull, as my pack train had occasion to testify in the summer of 1913. There are large sections of bristling lava, life-destroying sands and death-presaging glaciers which man has never explored.
All day we rode to the southward, and, save the wild swan on the ponds, no living creature crossed our trail. It was three in the afternoon before we found sufficient grass to afford the hungry ponies a bite; this was at the margin of a pool of glacial water that had filtered through the moraines. We regaled ourselves from the contents of our packing boxes, rested an hour, changed saddle horses and then pushed on over an unusually rough mass of terminal moraine at the foot of Láng Jökull. We turned towards the southwest, crossed a bog and arrived at the small saelhus, refuge, at Arnavatn, Eagle-Lake. This shelter of turf and stones was built for the protection of the sheep gatherers, who resort hither in the autumn to gather the sheep that have strayed to the highlands during the long summer.
The Glacier of Láng Jökull in the Kaldidalr.
Láng Jökull. Eiriks Jökull.