Blesi, Blaze, as the white stripe in a horse’s face, is a charming grotto. It is a double basin connected with a tunnel just beneath a narrow bridge near the surface. These basins are about thirty feet deep. One is eighteen by twelve and the other thirty by twenty feet in the longest and shortest diameters respectively. The water is wonderfully transparent and the white silicious lining of the grottoes reflects from the sky the delicate shade of blue transforming it into a huge cavity of lapis lazuli. Blesi is the traveler’s friend. It provides hot water for the bath, cooks his food, warms his couch through the medium of the hot water bag and prepares his coffee. Many a leg of mutton, many a brace of birds and innumerable are the eggs that have been faithfully prepared with its friendly heat. It is an easy method of cooking. Fill a pail with eggs and submerge it till they are soft, medium or hard, the time required is the same as in the kitchen. Place the meat in a cloth bag and do the same. Dip up the water and pour it upon the freshly ground berries, lo! the coffee is prepared and your meal is ready. This spring never erupts but pours out a steady stream which flows down the slope to join the runway from Geysir.

Strokr is another hot spring with a tube ten feet in diameter and over forty feet deep. In former days it was most accommodating and would always give an exhibition of its powers if a couple of bushels of turf were thrown into the tube. The response came in from five to forty minutes. It usually threw out the turf and ejected a column of water upwards of a hundred feet. Again and again would it hurl out the boiling water until its underground system was exhausted. Some years since a party of gentlemen, French I believe, desirous of obtaining an extra high spout threw many stones into the tube on top of the turf. The geyser siphon was doubtless broken or at least fractured so that superheated steam can not be stored, for Strokr spouts no more. It boils furiously all the time with dense clouds of steam and the water rises and falls in the tube in the most violent manner. In looking into the tube one is impressed with the idea that there are safer places, as it seems if Strokr were about to mount into the sky to challenge Geysir which has so long held the palm.

Geysir is the main attraction. The first mention of this phenomenon in literature is in the History of Norway written by Saxo Gramaticus, who lived between 1150 and 1206, so that it has been active for over seven centuries. It has built for itself a mound of geyserite many feet above the level of the plain and has the appearance of an inverted oyster shell in its series of terraces. This mound increases with each eruption by the addition of a film of salts held in solution in the boiling water. The spring is in the form of a saucer with the inward sloping side at an angle of thirty degrees. The diameter of this saucer is nearly seventy feet and the saucer is a true circle. Within a saucer there is a depression at the bottom, a ring to hold the cup. Within the center of Geysir’s saucer there is an opening, ten feet in diameter, which extends straight down to the depth of eighty-four feet. Beyond this the plumb will not go. Whether there are deeper ramifications of tubes or not is a matter of conjecture unless the explanation of geyser action above offered is correct. Again, the shape of Geysir is that of a funnel, i. e. a tube running downward from a flaring reservoir at the top. During the irregular periods between the eruptions, the water wells upwards in the center and overflows the rim of the basin through a foot square opening in the side. This opening has been shaped by the farmer of Haukadalr to confine the escaping hot water to one channel. The water is heavily charged with minerals in solution. An English analysis of a gallon of the water yielded the following:—

Sodium carbonate,5.56grains
Aluminum oxid,2.80”
Silica,31.38”
Sodium chlorid,14.42”
Sodium sulfate,8.57”
Total solids,62.73”

During eruptions large volumes of carbon dioxid and some hydrogen sulfid and a little free hydrogen are emitted. In 1909 my maximum recording thermometer was lowered to a depth of eighty feet and the temperature was 110C., or 230 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.

Words convey but a meager idea of the magnificence of this geyser during eruption, or the awe with which it inspires the witness of its extraordinary display of power. It was six-thirty in the evening, eight hours after we had administered the emetic of soap. Not a cloud dimmed the blueness of the sky and no air was stirring. The glaciers of Láng Jökull, the long ice-covered mountain, loomed beyond the plain of the Hvitá, White-River, the dome of Hekla, Hooded, had momentarily lost its cloud mantle, all the little geysers and fumaroles were boiling merrily and steaming furiously. Even quiet Blesi was sending up showers of carbon dioxid bubbles. The signs were favorable for an exhibition and the people were gathered close about the Inn in expectation. What the condition of the air has to do with the eruption, I do not suggest. Icelanders familiar with Geysir state that “when the wind is from the north there is never an eruption.” I can only add that during our first eighteen hours at this place we had a strong wind from the north and no eruption.

We were at supper. The ground trembled, the building vibrated and a dull rumbling reached the ears.

“Geysir! Geysir!” rose the cry from within and without the building. The supper was never finished. Johannes, who had been watching for these first signs ever since we had administered the emetic, met us as we sprang to the doorway. Everyone rushed to the elevation across from Geysir’s runway. Again the rumble, heavier than before. The water is agitated in the basin, it boils up suddenly, subsides, the earth beneath our feet trembles and a mass of steaming water rises in the center of the basin to an elevation of fifteen feet and overflows the rim with a noisy splash. Then all is quiet. Is this what we had travelled forty miles out of our way to see? Truly a great fuss for nothing. Is this the wonderful Geysir whose manifestation of power had caused the devout Henderson to fall upon his knees and to pour out his “soul in solemn adoration of the Almighty Author of nature, ‘who looketh on the earth, and it trembled; who toucheth the hills, and they smoke?’” Does Geysir demand more tribute in soap? A few moments of quiet expectation followed. Then, without further warning, a column of superheated water, ten feet in diameter, shot like a rocket into the air to the height of one hundred and twenty-five feet and the abysmal forces maintained that column for nine minutes. What a flood of water poured down the sloping cone! What a fountain! Mark Twain said that they “have real fountains in Europe but in America they only leak.” What would he have said could he have witnessed this display? The roar of falling water filled the air to the exclusion of all voices and flowed in hissing cascades down the slope, into the ravine and across the meadow to the river. The sheep fled before the advancing column of steam and from a distance gazed with a foolish stare at a spectacle that they had often witnessed. Volume upon volume of steam, like the cauliflower-shaped clouds of active Vesuvius, belched into the air expanding under the reduced pressure and filled the air to the shutting out of the sun. Fountains of foam well over the brink. Explosion follows explosion and still that lofty tower of boiling water stands erect and masses of water fall to earth with a terrific crash. The column wavers, totters, falls. The eruption is over, the steam clouds lift and we rush up the dripping slope of geyserite, step over the rim into the hot basin and peer down into these depths whence came those rivers of water. The heat penetrates the thick soles of the riding boots but we walk to the edge of the tube and gaze down into the sizzling throat of the monster. A mass of foam is over the bottom, eighty feet below. It rises, we watch its ascent of the tube with the pace of a fly up a wall. It reaches the junction of the tube with the bottom of the basin and we photograph it, just a mass of foam with ascending steam. It wells over into the basin and we retreat. Soon the basin is full and overflows normally and the only evidence of the change that has taken place is the dripping cone and the steam rising from the brook as it rushes to cool itself in the icy river.