Iceland: Horseback tours in saga land

by W. S. C. Russell

Seyðisfjörðr is the most picturesque of the eastern fiords. I have entered this fiord three times, once in fog and twice in the full sunshine. It was one of the earliest places visited by the Vikings and has ever since been the resort of the fishermen on account of its excellent harbor. The Iceland cable to Denmark by the way of the Faroe Islands lands here. In old times it was called the “Cooking Fiord,” (the name is still retained), because of the ease with which the small craft could run in from the sea to prepare their meals. The outer end is marked by two fine mountains rising abruptly from the water. The entire fiord is a recent glacial valley and its sides are marked by prominent raised beaches.

Going ashore and wandering along the single street that skirts the upper end of the fiord, I met an Icelander who spoke good English and we entered into a protracted conversation about the United States. He had formerly lived in North Dakota. During the American war with Spain he enlisted to serve under the American flag and was ordered to the Philippines, where he remained till he had completed his term of enlistment. When he received his discharge, the lure of the fatherland, the indescribable charm of the ancient fiords was too strong, so that, like many of his race who have emigrated to our Northwest, he returned to the haunts of his youth. His frugality in America had yielded him a competence for the remainder of his life in Iceland; the story of his wanderings in distant and tropical lands makes him as welcome among the fishermen during the long winters as were the scalds in the banqueting halls of Iceland’s ancient lords.

Aside from the towering mountains, precipitous and snow-crested, and the beautiful fiord between, the fascination of the valley lies in the upper end of the fiord with its half-cylindrical basin and its bisecting river roaring down its dozen waterfalls. From the extensive moorlands of Vestdalsheiði, West-Dale-Heath, flows a voluminous river, which enters the fiord in a regular series of waterfalls of marvelous beauty. The falls differ from each other in height of plunge and in the rock formation and from fall to fall the river slides down a steep gradient in an angry swirl of tossing waters. The upper fall is the finest in the series and has a sheer plunge of nearly a hundred feet over a perpendicular wall of lava into a broad basin. On either side of the valley numberless and turbulent cascades roll downward from the melting snows of the tangled ridges that mark the border of the great moorland plateau. The valley is long and narrow with the river in the very center and the river system may be likened to the skeleton of a serpent in which the backbone is the main stream and numerous and opposite ribs are the tributaries. There is a point near the wharf, at an elevation of five hundred feet above the fiord, which one may win in half an hour, that commands a view of the entire valley. If there is no fog this slight climb is richly rewarded. One stands upon a jutting point of lava at the head of one of the cascades, views the main stream with its terraces and every silver thread that extends from the snow line to the river. At his feet is the fiord with its fleet of fishing smacks, down the fiord is the open sea, the shining “swan-path” of the Sagas.

Near by is a strong showing of copper carbonate in the vesicula lava. All of the tubes and cavities are lined with this beautiful green encrustation. On the opposite side of the mountain there is a similar formation so that it is possible that there is a liberal deposit of this useful metal in this mountain. If it is located it will be easy to extract it as there is an abundance of waterpower within easy access for mechanical and electrolytical purposes.

One afternoon when the fog hung heavily upon fiord and mountain, with four of my Matador companions I set out to examine a glacial moraine which hangs upon the side of Bíhólsfjall, upon which I had looked with longing eye through a telescope the previous summer. Upward we climbed and when at an elevation of only a hundred feet above the fiord, the entire valley, all its buildings, the fiord and its shipping disappeared from view as if by enchantment. Many sounds came up through the fog in a strange jumble of discordant notes; a Norwegian tramp steamer was stowing a cargo of clip fish, hammers clanged in the little machine shop at our feet, so near that we could have tossed a stone upon its roof and the clack-clack-clack of a pony’s hoofs pacing the highway in haste to take its rider into a refuge from the storm. The rain came down in earnest but there was no wind. This was a strange condition under which to climb a mountain, whose slopes are deeply scored with crossing gullies, where patches of moorland stretch between ridges of talus and one may easily lose his way, but we desired the experience and difficult as was the climb it was well worth all the effort. If we separated from each other three rods we were lost to view. It was uncanny, this wandering among the gullies and carrying on a conversation with moving and invisible beings, almost ghostly. The fog, like fleecy blankets, hung around and rolled over us in wisps like broad bands of cotton, so that we literally stretched and tore it as we climbed through it. Two of my companions clung to the brook, where plant life was more vigorous, and it was a wise precaution if one did not know the direction of the ravines or the slope of the moorland. With the other two I turned toward the southwest and we were guided by the number of the ravines we crossed and the roar of a waterfall on the escarpment. We traversed a boggy area and finally reached the extensive moraine that was formerly pushed over the cliffs by the moving ice and is now being worked by the winter frosts and the deluge of water descending during the summer from the melting snows on the heights above. By the aneroid we had climbed to an elevation of 2,000 feet above the fiord. Here we turned and descended by the steep stairway of columnar basalt to the valley, not once having been out of the thick fog. Our tramp yielded considerable profit in the examination of the debris on the mountain side where we found excellent specimens of water-worn liparite, that the glacier had transported from the interior in former days. We also found fine specimens of chalcedony geods. These were enclosed in the pre-glacial lava, but the frost action has split the rock and the geods are easily removed. They are about the size of goose eggs. As we stumbled through the darkness of the fog, unable to choose our way for more than a rod at a time, there came to my mind that well known passage in Isaiah,—

“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known; I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight.”

During one trip up the east coast from Seyðisfjörðr to the Arctic Circle we enjoyed perfect sunshine, a rare phenomenon and worth a transatlantic voyage to witness it. I know of no grander scenery of sea, fiord, and mountain than this east coast. As one enters the broad bay of Vopnafjörðr, under clear weather conditions, the distant glacier of Vatna Jökull dazzles the eye as the sun shines upon its melting surface and is reflected with the luster of a mirror. The extreme barrenness of mountain and shore belies the verdure of the quiet vales between the scattered ridges. The mountains rise directly from the sea to a great height and the scorched lava, the sepia-colored liparite, the ashes and waterfalls yield wonderful shades of color. Within the shadows of the cliffs the tiny fishing craft like great gulls quietly await their prey.

On another trip over this same course, the fog closed in upon us suddenly and unexpectedly. At first there was a haze, a sun-streaked mist low on the water,—a moment, and mountain, shore and sea were closed to view. We put further out to sea to avoid the coast fog but the wind freshened and soon a gale was blowing. We were off Langaness, Long Cape, and almost on the Arctic Circle. Sea and wind bore down so heavily upon the little Matador that we were obliged to seek the protection of the cape, not daring to round it in the storm, and we cast anchor in Eiðisvik, Creek-Isthmus. As suddenly as the fog had appeared a few hours before, so now the Arctic Sea sprang into action and bore down upon the cape with great violence. We reached anchorage none too soon and there we remained with straining cables for forty-eight hours while the full fury of the blast blew itself to pieces. The wind came out of the north and it was cold, the waves ran high upon the bluffs of the Ness and all the sea fowl sought the shelter of its crevices. Out at sea a mere speck rose and fell upon the white-capped waves. With time it grew larger and we perceived that it was a belated dory retreating from the storm. It came straight under our stern and we noted that it was heavily laden with cod and rode deeply in the water. Four red capped Faroese manned its long oars and under less experienced oarsmen the boat would surely have swamped. If one wishes to observe the skill and power of men at the oars, let him not attend a college boat race on a quiet inland river, rather let him behold the hardy sons of the Faroe Islands, inured from childhood to the stormy waters of the north, bring their heavily laden boat out of the tempestuous Arctic Sea and beach it in safety on a stony shore.

I think that this is the most dreary spot in all Iceland. It is as lonesome and forbidding as the uninhabited and bleak coast of Jan Mayen four hundred miles to the north. A few rods from the shore there is a small lagoon and on the far side a few small houses, three I believe. The people live by fishing for there is scarcely enough grass for the few sheep and four cows that graze at the margin of the bird-infested lagoon. The cliffs and mountains that tower above the lagoon must be beautiful in sunshine, but it is otherwise in storm, and fog and Arctic storms prevail most of the time.

In a torrent of rain and with the wind blowing as only the unrestricted winds of the Polar Ocean can blow, five of us ventured to lower a boat and row ashore to beach it where we had observed that the Faroese had done the same the previous night. The entire beach is littered with drift wood consisting of bits of bark, branches and heavy timber. All of the material that I examined proved to be larch. A few trees bore the marks of the axe, but most of them had been torn up by the roots in some great river freshet and had been swept out to sea, probably from the great rivers of Siberia, the Lena, Obi, Kolyma and Yenisei. As I write I have before me a thick piece of bark from a Siberian larch that I picked up on this shore. What a voyage it has made! Whence came it and how long was its unlogged voyage? It is not in imagination that we scan its record. Though not in figures stating latitudes and longitudes and not in characters of ink, yet its great Polar voyage is clearly revealed to him who knows the currents of the north, the prevailing winds and the drift of the ice floes. This bit of bark passed out to sea during the spring floods that make such havoc in the Siberian forests; it became embedded in the ice, as did Nansen’s Fram. Slowly it drifted with the pack, now backwards under the pressure of the wind, now lifted in a great pressure ridge as two opposing packs met; now under the influence of wind and current it made progress and, again like the Fram, was liberated from the ice west of Spitzbergen and drifted southward to find lodgement on this bleak cape. Fifty miles away, on Rauðagnúpa, Red-Peak, in 1905 was picked up the Bryant-Melville cask, which had been placed on the pack ice north of Point Barrow in 1899. The elapsed time from the placing of this cask on the ice by Captain D. N. Tilton of the American whaler, Alexander, to the date of its discovery by the Icelandic farmer, Vigfus Benidiktsson, was five years, eight months and fourteen days. We have not the space in which to discuss the Great Polar Current but we can assert that this piece of larch bark, yes, and the thousands of larch trees, that come to land on the north coast of Iceland and in Driftwood Bay in Jan Mayen, have journeyed over or near the North Pole. The wood is a boon to the Icelanders as it is used for fuel and in the construction of their houses.