At eight in the morning I awoke and was scarcely out of bed when the door opened and in came the maid, Kristine, with coffee, sugar, cream and cakes for our first meal. I tried to have her leave it outside the door and motioned her away but it was of no use. In she came with the air of one who knew her duty to her master’s guests and intended to fulfill it. She placed the tray on a stand, turned quickly to our clothes, gathered them up and was about to take them away when I protested as vigorously as I could with signs that they were necessary for my immediate use, but to no effect. I did succeed in pulling from her grasp my trousers but she fled smilingly with all the other items of wearing apparel even to the hats and riding boots. We were prisoners. After the coffee had been drunk the maid returned with the clothes nicely brushed and folded and the boots polished. Ever after this I slept with my trousers under my pillow and my extra pair of shoes hid in the room; otherwise I would have often been deprived of an hour of delightful strolling about the farm before the real breakfast.
Fording a Shallow Arm of the Mývatn. Turf Cottage in the Distance.
Contorted, Twisted and Crumpled Lava at Skútustaðir.
The Mývatn region is the most fascinating, the most weird as well as the most beautiful place in all Iceland. I believe it to be the fairest spot in all that land of sun-kissed and wind-swept enchantment. The lake is twenty miles long and its deepest place is not over twelve feet. There are places where the water is hot and others where the water flows from under the lava in ice-cold streams into the lake. At the entrance of these streams there is excellent trout fishing. The lake is dotted with islands, each a small crater, each fringed to the edge of the water with the fragrant Angelica, each clothed with grass nearly to the summit and each summit black and red, scorched, blistered and horrent. Hundreds of these low craters fringe the southern end of the lake and are scattered over the adjoining farms, especially the farm of Skútustaðir. They are an exact representation of the mountains of the moon as viewed through a powerful telescope. To the geologist the Mývatn craters are of rare interest, for nowhere else on the earth are they duplicated in the numbers and in their peculiar formation. They rest like huge ant hills on a level plain, each is circular in form and many of them are confluent at the base. The slopes of many of the mounds are covered with bombs and of characteristic type. The character of the bombs on the slopes of widely separated craters is different, indicating a different period of eruption and a different composition of lava which entered into their formation.
One of the craters deserves a special description. It is shaped like an inverted funnel with the stem cut off at the apex of the funnel. Out of this orifice the lava was hurled in liquid drops to so great a height in the air that it cooled and the bombs returned to the crater and around it like a shower of grape-shot. It must have been a wonderful sight, the spraying of the upper air with liquid lava like water from a hose and to such an altitude that the stream broke into drops and every drop cooled before it returned to earth. A few of the bombs are fused together because they collided in a viscid condition. Others are flattened because the mass struck the earth before they had become rigid; but most of them are spherical and vary in size from tiny pellets to a croquet ball.
There are several tintrons around Mývatn and in the adjacent region of Húsavik. A tintron is a hornito, or more correctly speaking, a lava chimney. A hornito is a veritable lava oven from which issues smoke and fumes and it may be level or even sunk below the level of the general surface of the lava sheet; while a tintron, like a factory chimney with a spreading base, rises from the level ground to the height of many feet. It is evident from examination that they were formed by the spouting of lava in a liquid state so hot as to have lost its viscousness, and, like geyser-formations, that which fell upon the rim cooled and continual spoutings built the tintron. We ascended one of the tintrons beside the lake and gazed down into its black depths. The outer surface at the base is clothed with grass while the tintron proper is encrusted with lichens. What a rugged and forbidding aspect is presented in the interior! Deep, deep down into the earth extends the flue, its wall hung with lava stalactites and patches of lava that solidified as the material dripped back into the interior after an explosion.
Of the scores of craters around Mývatn that I explored, only one contained water,—except those in the lake,—and this one is known as Thangbrandspollr, Thangbrand’s Pool. Thangbrand was a Saxon Priest whom Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway (995-1000 A. D.) sent to Iceland to perform a wholesale christening of the pagans. King Olaf forced Christianity upon his subjects at the point of the sword, killing and plundering all who refused to forsake the worship of Thor and Odin and take the christening. Thangbrand was chosen for the Icelandic mission because of his inhuman and zealous methods. He had, what he deserved, little success. We read that,—
[9]“Hall let himself be christened and all his household.”