Thou are the wisest of mankind.’”
Trans. by Cottle.
In this Ode we are told that Surtur was the adversary of Odin, that he dwelt in the Antarctic,—
“Where decked with many a shining car,
Gods and great Surtur rush to war.”
This was on the fabled plain of Vigriði, where “a hundred miles around” on the wreck of the fiery elements the gods battled with their enemies and with the enemies of the mortals whom they protected. One article of the Norse mythology states that Surtur, the black prince of the nether regions, should come from the south and set the world on fire. Here where the devastation of volcanic fire blast is terrible, where a whole valley is filled with the scorched and blistered lava flow from the ice-crowned volcanoes, here where the great, black cavern extends for a mile under ground, the early settlers located the abode of the dread black prince, Surtur, and most fittingly. It was with a knowledge of this cave in his mind that Jules Verne wrote his story of “A Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
Beside the entrance and on a mound of crumpled lava stands a varða, cairn, to mark the way. Hundreds of these cairns have been built in the past centuries throughout the travelled portions of Iceland to guide the traveller over the mountain passes, across the sandy deserts and extensive wastes of glacial moraine as well as to point the direction to places where grass may be found for the ponies. There is a style in Icelandic cairns as in women’s clothes and one can tell by their outward appearance at what period they were built. They reminded Henderson of the passage in Jeremiah xxxi, 21,—“Set thee up way-marks, make thee high heaps.”
A portion of the roof of the cavern fell in at some remote period and this is the entrance. We climbed down with some difficulty to the snow bank and found a ptarmigan perched upon a block of stone. I had no difficulty in approaching within ten feet and she waited for me to take two photographs. This is the largest and the longest lava tunnel known. It is not, by any means the largest cave, but the largest underground passage by which lava formerly flowed that has been explored. It was formed by the lava filling the floor of the valley and cooling on top and then draining out underneath to some lower level. It was in exactly this same manner that the great lava flow came down from Skjalbreith, filled Thingvellir and then drained out and left the great plain between the mountains to fall to form that wonderful formation previously described in chapter six.
Vergil says,—“facilis descensus Averno” but we did not find it easy to descend into the Averno of Surtur, nor to follow the cavern once we had made the descent. We purchased candles at Akureyri for this purpose and lighting them we entered the chamber with one in each hand; there being three of us we had six candle power. “How far that little candle throws his beams,” of Shakespeare, was all too short a distance in this blackness. A little beyond the entrance is a side passage which we entered and where we found hundreds of bones of sheep and horses. This was the place formerly occupied by the above mentioned outlaws and thus far the legend above related is a truth. There being no animals in Iceland large enough to carry flesh into this corner it is clear that they were taken here by the hand of man. There are many hundreds of them showing what an extensive use was made of the retreat in the old days. Henderson mentions them in 1817 and Olafsen and Povelsen found them in 1753 so there is no doubt of their great age and we may justly conclude that these bones are those left by the outlaws. As I write I have two of them before me, one a vertebra of a sheep and the other a rib of a pony. This rib had been broken while the horse was living and had been healed again as the callosity testifies. As I look at this ancient bone I often wonder what a story it could relate of the cave where it has rested these hundreds of years and of the deeds of that lawless age.
For the first quarter of a mile the floor of the cave is strewn with great basaltic plinths that have fallen from the roof from time to time. Each stone was damp, dripping wet or coated with ice from the water that has percolated through the roof. The blocks were so large that in climbing over them we frequently found ourselves in holes up to the waist and as our candles gave only a baleful glimmer it was difficult to make progress. One can not step down into these holes without first assuring himself where the bottom is. Once down he must crawl up over the slippery stones on the opposite side.