CHAPTER XIV.

THREE DAYS AT THE SOLFATARA OF MÝ-VATN.

I cannot accuse myself of failing to do traveller’s duty at Mý-vatn: although the weather became raw and rainy, not an hour was wasted. The first step was to climb the nearest height and form a general notion of Midge-water, which must not be derived _à micturitione Diaboli_. It is said to be forty miles in circumference--you might as well measure round a spider--and the “gorgeous green isles” look like lumps of mud in a horsepond; their only use is to grow angelica; but we saw them under a dull grey sky, like an inverted pewter-pot. The mean of many observations gave for the aneroid 29·12, and the thermometer 54°: if this be correct, Midge Lake must be nearer 900 than 1500 feet above sea-level. Travellers tell you that the fair dimensions were curtailed by the great eruption of Leirhnúkr and Krafla (1724-30); that the lava is not yet thoroughly cooled; and that consequently the surface is never wholly frozen. But the Krafla, as we shall see, can never have flowed here, and there are old craters and hornitos, volcanoes in miniature, all about the edge: the whole becomes a solid sheet of ice, except where sulphur and other minerals send forth springs more or less tepid; moreover we found a depth of only 27 feet. The bottom is black and muddy; the water along shore is shallow and weedy, sedgy and spumy, whitening the coast and the island edges; it is glorious breeding-ground for the blood-drawing “chief inhabitants of the district.” Gnat terrors are emphatically noticed, and one traveller assures us that the people wear a visored cassinet of black cloth to guard head and neck. They are compared with those _feræ naturæ_, the midges of Maine; “No-see-ums,” the “Indians” call them. We brought

veils, and hardly saw a “Mý”--but then, the cold weather was against the “bodies of Behemoths and the stings of dragons.” Nor did we find Mý-vatn “a place where birds and fishes abound, and where many of the wonders of Iceland are concentrated.” Every student of the avi-fauna who has sighted the pool, from the days of Proctor and Krüper to those of Shepherd[160] and Baring-Gould, makes it a very happy hunting-ground: all give lists which bring water to the sportsman’s mouth. Ten short years, however, have made the latest obsolete. We did not meet with a single Iceland falcon, once so common; the birds, with the exception of gulls, a host of sandpipers, and plucky little terns, whose sharp beaks threatened our heads and eyes, were rare in the extreme; and we found defunct chicks at every few hundred yards. Although we boated and shot over the ugly puddle, our only bag consisted of a mallard, a widgeon, a few grebes and pipers, and the Sefönd or horned grebe (_Podiceps cornutus_ or _auritus_?), tufted on both sides of the head. The waters supplied trout and char; there is no salmon, as the fish cannot leap the falls twenty-five miles from the lake. Dead shells lay everywhere upon the spumy margin, and the corpse of a duck was found studded with mollusks. The soil, disintegrated volcanic rock, is of the richest; some thirty farms and farmlets are scattered about the Hlíðar or ledges between the several lava-gushes; and the pastures support some 3000 sheep.

The Mý-vatn is somewhat in the delta shape, with the apex fronting west (⊳), and with the base extending seven to eight miles: its drain, the Laxá frá Mý-vatn, escaping about the point and feeding the Skálfandi Fjörð, must be a mere torrent. North of it is the lumpy, uninteresting mound, Vindbeljarfjall, “wind-bellows hill;” the bag to the south, and the nozzle to the north-east; an African pair of bellows, _i.e._, one “bellow,” if such word there be. It is a trigonometrical station like the Hlíðarfjall, a bare cone north-east of Reykjahlíð. The points and promontories are most remarkable to the south, but these and other features will be better observed on the road to the Fremrinámar.

My general survey ending about noon, I set out for Leirhnúkr and Krafla under the guidance of Hr Pètur Jónsson, the farmer of Reykjahlíð. The tall, burly old man, made taller by contrast with his little Jack nag, had fenced himself against the grey mist and skurrying sea-wind by the usual huge comforter meeting the billy-cock hat behind; by “conservators” of green glass, and by a mighty paletot of the thickest Wadmal. We followed yesterday’s road, and now I carefully observed the lay of the land. Beyond the green and grassy point, Höfði (the headland), we came upon sundry veins of lava about a century and a half old, and much like slag: where Palagonite-conglomerate forms the surface, begin the Sandfell and the Hlíðarnámar (Lithewells), the latter wrongly confounded in the map with the Námar to the east of the Námafjall range. A couple of boards some six inches long were the only signs of work. The dirty-yellow mountain, striped from top to toe, as if washed by rain, with primrose, brick-red, dark blue, pea-green, light blue, and chalky-white, now stood smoking before us; and beginning the ascent, we passed the two boulders of pure sulphur, from which every traveller has carried off a bittock. Threading the Námaskarð by a decent path, we wound first to south and then to north, till we sighted the mud caldrons on the eastern slope. In Henderson’s day they numbered twelve; in 1872 apparently they were on their “last legs:” two lay to the north, four to the south; they were shaped like Sitz baths, and they ejected, with a mild puff which could not be called a roar, spirts of repulsive slime, blue-black, like mud stained by sulphate of iron. These “Makkalubers” contrasted strongly with the patches of lively citron and sprightly pink all about the slopes. One traveller finds it a “most appalling scene”--he must be easily “appalled.”

Debouching upon the eastern plain, we rode along the foot of the Dalfjall (dale-hill), which continues the Sulphur Range to the north, hugging the sides to avoid the Steiná, another bed of newish lava, an impossible mass of cinder, brown, black, and red, on our right. The path was well grown, but the “lady of the woods” (birch) is a dwarf in these parts, and looked tame beside the patches of Dryas. We flushed sundry ptarmigan, which were certainly not “absurdly tame.” After an hour and a half of “Trossacks,” which on return was covered in forty-five minutes, we halted at Skarðsel, a little Setr or summer shieling, a mere “but and ben” without tún, a heap of peat and stones grubbed out into rooms. The primitive churn found in every dairy shows that the ewes’ cream is here made into cheese, whilst the skim-milk forms the national Skýr. Of course the animals are poor and thin all the year round--the effect of continued “drain upon the constitution.”

Beyond the Skarðsel, we began to ascend and round sundry diseased and mangy hills, walking up the higher pitches, and riding over peat mounds, based upon oldish lava. After a total of two hours, we dismounted at the foot of Leirhnúkr (mud-knoll), where the horses’ hoofs flung up mere sulphur, and where warm, damp air escaped from every hole. The view from the summit convinced me that the emplacement has been poorly described by travellers. It is the northern head of a thin spine, a sharp prism about a mile broad, lying almost upon a meridian (215° mag.), and continuing the heights of Thríhyrningr, Dalfjall, and Námafjall. At some distance to the north-west rises the snowy buttress, Gæsadalsfjöll (geese-dale hills), almost concealing the Kinnarfjall (cheek or jaw mountain). Nearer lies a chain of cones and craters, with sundry outliers; they seem to have discharged a torrent nine miles long by three of maximum breadth, which inundated the north-eastern corner of the Mý-vatn with veins and arteries of fire; and the scatter of hornitos and fumaroles to the north has also aided in the work of destruction, or rather reconstruction. The map shows only a patch of lava reaching from Leirhnúkr to the Hlíðarfjall cone south-west.

The Leirhnúkr proper is composed of two hillocks trending north and south; the southern is larger than the northern, and the whole, a long oval extending some 2000 paces, is one vast outcrop. The lowland to the east is far broader than the western, a mere slip; here frequent splotches of sulphur and anaphysemata, or gas vents, lead to the Krafla springs. The aneroid showed the summit of the Mud-Knoll to be about 2000 feet above sea-level. Henderson (i., p. 167) calls it a volcano, and connects it with his other volcano, Krafla, by a non-existing ridge; but with him, _omne ignotum_, etc.--Hrossaborg and even Herðubreið are volcanoes. When he compares the scenery with that of the Dead Sea, one of the fairest of salt-water lakes, we must remember that his idea of “Asphaltites” was borrowed from that lively modern writer, Strabo.

We then remounted and rode over the dwarf Phlegræan fields to the Námar of Krafla,[161] the _immense soufrière_ of M. Robert. The lowland is here studded with many inverted cones of cold, blue water; the principal feature being Helvíti Stærra (Greater Hell). It is an irregular circle, with little projections at the longest diameter, north-west to south-east, a large, tawny funnel of burnt clay and bolus, the degradation of trachyte and Palagonite, about 800 yards across. This is the famous “mud-caldron of Krabla,” a “natural phenomenon hardly inferior to the Geyser;” but Henderson’s Hell of 1815 was greatly changed in 1872; and we shall see far larger features at the Hverfjall and the Námarkoll. Instead of that “terrific scene,” the “jetting pool” of wild illustrations, a lakelet smiling in the bright sun, which burst the clouds about two P.M., a placid expanse of green-blue water, cold, and said to be deep, occupied the bottom of the hole, and the only movement was a shudder as the wind passed over it. I could not help thinking of “La belle vision d’Élie, ou un Dieu passe sous la figure d’un vent léger.” Despite the “abrupt and precipitous descent, 200 feet deep,” there is no difficulty in descending the sides of “Olla Vulcani,” now the mere dregs of a volcano.

After inspecting this poor, “abolished Hell,” we rode round it northwards, crossing sundry snow-wreaths, which on the Libanus would be called Talláját, and left our cards upon “Little Hell.” The latter is composed of two smaller lakes on a higher plane, one bearing east-south-east and the other south-east. Between the pair lie some half-dozen slimy-bordered “leir-hverar,”[162] mud-boilers of fetid smell: the ejections bubbled and spluttered, falling into their own basins, and the fumes did not prevent the growth of Fífa and bright lichens.

After seeing what you may see in almost any solfatara, we rode to the north-east, and in twenty minutes we ascended the turfy and muddy northern cone of Krafla mountain; a mass of Palagonite, pierced, to judge from the surface scatters, with white trachyte. An isolated cone appears in the map; I found that the northerly part sweeps round to the north-north-east, connecting with the Hágaung (high-goer), a long, meridional buttress of similar formation; whilst the south-eastern prolongation anastomoses with the black mass called the Hraftinnuhryggr or “Obsidian mountain.” I utterly failed to discover any sign of crater: we are told that Krafla was torn in half during the last century, and Henderson apparently makes Great Helvíti the remains of the bowl. From the apex, where the aneroid showed 27·30, we could trace the course of the Laxá; and a gleam in the north was pronounced by the farmer to be the Axarfjörð, a corner of the house where dwells _Le Père Arctique_. Upon the black summit, where we

“Toil and sweat, and yet be freezing cold,”

Dryas was still in bloom, and violets and buttercups were scattered over the lower slopes. I looked in vain for specimens of the plumbago or black lead, reported to be found on Krafla. There is no objection to its presence in this katakekaumene; “graphitical carbon” was found by M. Alibert in the volcanic formations of Siberian Meninski, so it is not confined, as at Borrowdale, to the “primitives.”

As we were descending the hill, my guide inspected a flock of his own sheep, and I vainly attempted to lay in a store of fresh mutton. These people would probably sell, if they could get $8 to $9 per head, some 2000 of their 3000 animals, and greed of gain would leave them almost destitute. Yet here, as at other farms, it is impossible, even with a week’s work and offering treble price, to buy a single head; excuses are never wanting, “There is no one to send! All the ewes have lambs! The lambs are not fit for food!” The latter probably means that the lamb will in time become a sheep; the wild negro of the African interior, equally logical, expects a chicken to bring the price of a hen. In Tenerife I should have shot a wether, and have left the price upon its skin.

A shallow valley led to the Hraftinnuhryggr, where previous accounts would induce you to expect a “mountain of broken wine-bottles,” all “shining with their jetty colouring.” The thin strew upon the streamlet sides and about the feet was of small fragments, which became larger as I ascended. Mostly it was black and regular, that is, not banded, and the outer coating was a reddish paste: in places it forms a conglomerate with sandstone, and on the eastern summit, where trachyte also crops out, it seems to be _in situ_. M. Cordier (p. 278) translates the word “_pierre de Corbeau_,” thus robbing the raven: he proposes “_gallinace_” (_i.e._, turkey-buzzard), for the glassy material of pyroxenic base, reserving “obsidian” for the felspathic. From this place, I believe, came the specimens lately studied by Dr Kennott of Zurich: one of them exhibited under the microscope, “numerous small, brown, hollow bodies, of globular and cylindrical shape, regularly arranged in definite series.” Obsidian has been found north-east of Hekla, passing into pumice, and old Icelandic travellers seem to confound it with pitchstone, asphalte, or bitumen of Judea, a vegetable produce. Many of the obsidians are remarkably acid. “Iceland agate” (why?) must be handled with care, as Metcalfe found to the cost of his bridle-hand. Iceland ignores the pure “stone age” of Tenerife and Easter Island; and though strangers pick up specimens, the “volcanic glass” here has never been worked, as by the natives of the Lipari group. I observed that Ravenflint ridge, which prolongs the Krafla, is itself prolonged by the Sandabotnafjöll, and by the Jörundr, which the map makes an isolated cone. The classical name of the latter suggests memories of the old anchorite of Garðar.

The day ended pleasantly. After finding what there was and what there was not to be seen, I galloped back in a fine sun and warm evening, and after seven hours thirty minutes of total

work, found my companions busy in pitching the tent, despite the cold threats of night. They complained of the stranger’s room, although it rejoiced in such luxuries as two windows, a bed and curtains, looking-glass, commode, map, thermometer, and a photograph of Jón Sigurðsson. The house, with five gables, fronts west-south-west to “Wind-bellows hill;” here the south wind is fair and warm, the norther brings rain, the easter is wet, and the wester dry and tepid. As in England, the south-wester is the most prevalent, and flowers thrive best where best sheltered from it. The house has the usual appurtenances, workshop and carpenter’s bench; smithy and furnace; byre and sheep-fold. The shabby little windmill, with three ragged sails, goes of itself, like Miss K.’s leg; there is an adjacent Laug, of course never used, and the nearness of the lake renders a Lavapés (rivulet) unnecessary. Plough, harrows, watering-pot, and hay-cart are also evidences of civilisation, but the kail-yard is nude of potatoes--probably they require too much hard labour. Shabbier than the windmill, the church, bearing date 1825, lacks cross, and wants tarring; it has no windows to speak of, and the turf walls are built after an ancient fashion, now rare, the herring-bone of Roman brickwork. The cemetery around it is indecently neglected, and bones, which should be buried, strew the ground. Baring-Gould (1863) gives an account of its chasubles and other ecclesiastical frippery, which may still be there, unless sold to some traveller. It is a lineal descendant of that “church which in an almost miraculous manner escaped the general conflagration” of 1724-30. Henderson adds the question, “Who knows but the effectual fervent prayer of some pious individual, or some designs of mercy, may have been the cause fixed in the eternal purpose of Jehovah for the preservation of this edifice?” I may simply remark that lava does not flow up hill; the stream split into two at the base of the mound, without “being inspired with reverence for the consecrated ground,” and united in the hollow farther down. Yet travellers of that age derided the Neapolitan who placed his Madonna in front of the flowing lava; and when she taught him the lesson of Knútr (Canute) the Dane,[163] tossed her into the fire with a _‘naccia l’anima tua_, etc., etc., etc. Superstition differs not in kind, but only in degree.

The reason for the tent-pitching soon appeared. The burly farmer has a lot of lubberly sons, and two surly daughters; “Cross-patch” and “Crumpled-horn” being attended by half-a-dozen suitors and women friends, _bouches inutiles_ all. If we look into the kitchen, these Lucretias make a general bolt. There is extra difficulty in getting hot-water, although Nature, as “Reykjahlíð” shows, has laid it on hard by; and even the cold element is brought to us in tumblers. The coffee is copiously flooded; this is feminine economy, which looks forward to the same pay for the bad as for the good; and cups, which suggest “take a ’poon, pig,” poorly supply the place of the pot. One of the sons speaks a little English: we tried him upon the lake, and after two hours’ rowing he was utterly exhausted. Besides, there are lots of loafers, jolter-headed, crop-eared youngsters,

“With no baird to the face Nor a snap to the eyes,”

who are mighty at doing nothing: they peep into, and attempt to enter, the tent; when driven off they lounge away to the smithy, or to the carpenter’s bench, and satisfied with this amount of exercise, they lounge back into the house, where we hear them chattering and wrangling, cursing and swearing, like a nest of young parrots. They remind me of the Maori proverb, “Your people are such lazy rogues, that if every dirt-heap were a lizard, no one would take the trouble to touch its tail and make it run away.” They cannot even serve themselves: the harder work is done by a pauper couple, a blind man and his wife, who sleep in the hay-loft. The only sign of activity is shown by the carpenter, Arngrímr, a surly fellow, wearing a fur cap, like a man from the Principalities, and with mustachioes meeting his whiskers, like those of the Spanish Torero. “He is Nature’s artist,” says the student, meaning that he has taught himself to paint, and _hélas!_ to play flute and fiddle. So the evening ends with ditties, dolefully sung, and the Icelandic national hymn, the latter suggesting Rule (or rather be Ruled) Britannia. We are curious to know how all these sturdy idlers live. They fish; they eat rye-bread and Skýr; they rob the nests, and at times they kill a few birds: the best thing that could happen to them would be shipment to Milwaukee, where they would learn industry under a Yankee taskmaster. I have drawn this unpleasant interior with Dutch minuteness: it is the worst known to me in Iceland.

The old farmer, Pètur Jónsson, lost no time in deserving the character which he has gained from a generation of travellers; his excuse is that he must plunder the passing stranger in order to fill the enormous gapes which characterise his happy home. Yet he makes money as a blacksmith; he owns a hundred sheep, and he is proprietor of a good farm. In his old billycock, his frock-coat and short waistcoat, he looks from head to foot the lower order of Jew; we almost expect to hear “ole clo’” start spontaneously from his mouth. He began by asking $3, to be paid down, for the Krafla trip, and $4, the hire of four labouring men, for trinkgeld to the Fremrinámar; and the manner was more offensive than the matter of the demand. His parting bill was a fine specimen of its kind. It is only fair to state that he bears a very bad name throughout the island.

Next day the north wind still blew; the heavy downpour at five A.M. became a drizzle two hours later; and at ten A.M. there was a blending of sunshine and mistcloud, which showed that we had nought to fear save a shower or two of rain and sleet. Mr Lock (_fils_) and I determined upon a ride to the Fremrinámar; “a field of sulphur and boiling mud,” says Baring-Gould, “not visited by travellers, as it is difficult of access, and inferior in interest to the Námar-fjall springs.” After breakfast, we set out, each provided with two nags, which we drove over the lava-field to the Vogar farm, about half-an-hour distant on the other side of the grassy point, Höfði. This “oasis in the lava”--a description which applies to all the farms of Eastern Mý-vatn--was the parsonage in Ólafsson’s day (1772); we expected to find the Jón Jónsson mentioned by Shepherd, who had learned English in Scotland--he had, however, joined _il numero dei più_. As sometimes happens to the over-clever, we notably “did” ourselves; the owner, Hjálmar Helgason, a very civil man over a tass of brandy, was, we afterwards found out, a son-in-law of old Pètur; he also, doubtless informed of the _rixe_, demanded $4, which we had to pay; he kept us waiting a whole hour whilst the horses were being driven in, and he sent with us a raw laddie, whose only anxiety was to finish the job.

Shortly after noon we rode forward, crossing the unimportant Gjá, which the map stretches in a zigzag south of Reykjahlíð; we passed the “horrid lava-track” of Ólafsson, a mild mixture of clinker and sand, and in twenty minutes we reached Hverfjall, lying to the south-east. From afar the huge black decapitated cone, symmetrically shaped and quaquaversally streaked, has a sinister and menacing look. It is not mentioned by Henderson, whose account of the Mý-vatn is very perfunctory. According to Baring-Gould, it is “built up of shale and dust, and has never erupted lava:” as the name shows, it contained a Hver, or mudspring. We mounted it in ten minutes, and found the big bowl to consist of volcanic cinder and ashes based upon Palagonite and mud: the shape was somewhat like that of the Hauranic “Gharáreh” which supplied the lava of the Lejá. The aneroid (28·70; thermometer, 83°) showed some 800 feet above Reykjahlíð; and the vantage-ground gave an excellent view of the lake, with its low black holms and long green islets, of which the longest and the greenest is Miklaey (mickle isle). This _Monte nuovo_ was erupted in 1748-52; and a plaited black mound in the easily-reached centre shows where the mud was formerly ejected. Almost due south of it lies a precisely similar feature, the Villíngafjall. These formations are technically called Sand-gýgr, “sand craters,” opposed to Eld-gýgr, the “fire abyss;” and their outbreaks form the “sand summers” and the “sand winters” of arenaceous Iceland and its neighbourhood. I look upon the Hverfjall as the typical pseudo-volcanic formation of the island.

The real start was at one P.M., when, having rounded the western wall of the Hverfjall, we passed east of a broken line of craters based upon thin-growing grass. The whole can be galloped over, but ’ware holes! Nor did I find the skirt of a lava-flood always an “unsurmountable barrier to Iceland ponies,” although in new places it may be. On the east was Búrfell (“byre” hill), the name is frequently given to steep, circular, and flat-topped mounds; south-west of it lay the Hvannfell, long and box-shaped. Farther to the south-west, and nearly due south of the lake, rose Sellandarfjall, apparently based on flat and sandy ground; patches of snow streaked the hogsback, which distinguished itself from the horizontal lines of its neighbours. Far ahead towered the steely heights of Bláfjall, which from the east had appeared successively a cone and a bluff: it still showed the snows which, according to travellers, denote that the Sprengisandur is impassable; the last night had added to them, but the lower coating soon melted in the fiery sun-bursts. The line of path was fresh lava overlying Palagonite; and in the hollows dwarf pillars of black clay were drawn up from the snow by solar heat: their regular and polygonal forms again suggested doubts about the igneous origin of basalt, which may simply result from shrinking and pressure. This columnar disposal of dried clay, and even of starch desiccated in cup or basin, was noticed by Uno Von Troil as far back as 1770.

After an hour’s sharp ride, during which my little mare often rested on her nose, we struck a cindery divide, a scene of desolation with sandy nullahs, great gashes, down whose sharp slopes we were accompanied bodily by a fair proportion of the side: of course the ascents were made on foot. The material is all volcanic and Palagonitic; here trap and trachyte _in situ_ apparently do not exist: as we made for a _Brèche de Roland_, east of Bláfjall, we passed a sloping wall of white clay; and at half-past three we halted and changed nags at the Afréttr (_compascuum_), to which the neighbouring farmers drive their sheep in July and August. The lad called it the Laufflesjar, leafy green spots in the barren waste. We saw little of the willow which he had led us to expect; but the dark sand abounded in flowers and gramens; the former represented by the white bloom of the milfoil (_Achillea millefolium_), which the people term Vallhumall,[164] or “Welsh,” that is, “foreign,” hop; and the latter by the Korn-Súra (_Polygonum viviparum_), viviparous Alpine buckwheat. A snow-patch at the western end of the plainlet gave us drink; and thus water, forage, and fuel were all to be found within a few hundred yards. The guide said it was half-way, whereas it is nearly two-thirds, and we rode back to it from Bláfjall, which bears 100° (mag.), in an hour.

Resuming our road we rounded the sides of the hillocks, and presently we attacked a Hraun unmarked by Varðas. Discharged by a multitude of little vents, the upper and the lower portions are the most degraded; the middle flood looks quite new, and ropy like twisted straw. We now sighted and smelt the smoke pouring from the yellow lip, which looks as if the sun were ever shining upon its golden surface, and which stands out conspicuous from the slaggy, cindery, and stony hills. At five P.M., after a ride of four hours and a half, we reached the northern or smaller vent, an oval opening to the north-north-west, and we placed our nags under shelter from the wind. The hair was frozen on their backs into “_lamellæ niveæ et glaciales spiculæ_;” they had no forage beyond a bite at the Afréttr, and we were on a high, bleak level, the aneroid showing 27·10, and the thermometer 40°.

When the sun had doffed his turban of clouds, we sat upon the edge of the Little “Ketill” and studied the site of the Fremrinámar, the “further springs,” because supposed to be most distant from the lake. From the Öræfi the pools seem to cluster about the yellow crater; now we see that they occupy all the eastern slope of the raised ground, the section of the Mý-vatns Sveit extending from Búrfell to Bláfjall. The northern vent is merely one of the dependencies of Hvannfell; the southern or Great Crater belongs to the “Blue Mountain.” We presently turned southwards and ascended the Great Kettle, which Paijkull declares to be “probably the largest in Iceland.” This Námakoll, “head” or “crown of the springs,” is an oval, with the longer diameter disposed north-east to south-west (true), and measuring nearly double the shorter axis (600:350 yards).[165] The outer wall, raised 150 to 200 feet, is one mass of soft sulphur covered by black sand; every footstep gives vent to a curl of smoke, and we do not attempt to count the hissing fumaroles, which are of every size from the thickness of a knitting-needle upwards. With the least pressure a walking-stick sinks two feet. We pick up fragments of gypsum; alum, fibrous and efflorescent; and crystals of lime, white and red, all the produce of the Palagonite, which still forms the inner crust; and we read that sal ammoniac and rock-salt have also been found. The rim is unbroken, for no discharge of lava has taken place; the interior walls are brick-red and saffron-yellow, and where snow does not veil the sole, lies a solid black pudding, the memorial cairn of the defunct Hver or Makkaluber. From the west end no sulphur fumes arise; south-eastward the ruddy _suffioni_ extend to a considerable distance.

The Appendix will describe the old working of these diggings, which did not pay, although the hundredweight cost only ten shillings. At the southern end a staff planted in the ground amongst the hissing hot coppers still shows the labourers’ refuge, a shed built with dry lava blocks. If Professor Henchel characterised them correctly as “bad, because all the sulphur was taken away last year” (1775), they have wonderfully recovered in the course of a century: evidently “all the sulphur” means only the pure yellow flowers lying on the surface. The mass of mineral is now enormous. The road to the lake is a regular and easy slope, and working upon a large scale would give different results from those obtained by filling and selling basketfuls.

From the summit of the Námakoll we had an extensive view of the unknown region to the south. Upon the near ridge stood the Sighvatr rock, the landmark of the Öræfi, from which it appears a regular pyramid: here it assumes the shape of a _Beco de papagaio_. I now ascertained that there are no northern Dýngjufjöll, or rather that they are wrongly disposed upon the map. I wonder also how that queer elongated horse-shoe farther south, the “Askja” or “Dýngjufjöll hin Syðri,” came to be laid out; but my knowledge of the ground does not enable me to correct the shape. North of Herðubreið lay the Herðubreiðarfell, all blue and snow-white. To the south-west stretched far beyond the visible horizon the Ódáða Hraun, which most travellers translate the “Horrible Lava,” and some “Malefactors’ Desert” or “Lava of Evil Deed.” The area is usually estimated at 1160 square miles, more than one-third the extent of the Vatnajökull, which it prolongs to the north-west. Viewed from the Námakoll it by no means appears a “fearful tract, with mountains standing up almost like islands above a wild, black sea.” I imagine that most of the _contes bleues_ about this great and terrible wilderness take their rise in the legendary fancies of the people touching the Útilegumenn, or outlaws who are supposed to haunt it. I observed that Hr Gíslason prepared a pair of revolvers in case we met them upon the Öxi; and I found to my cost that even educated men believe in them. Previous travellers may be consulted about the Happy Valleys in the stone-desert, the men dressed in red Wadmal, the beautiful women, and the hornshod horses. I can only observe that such a society has now no _raison d’être_; it might have had reasons to fly its kind, but a few sheep lost during the year are not sufficient proofs of such an anomaly still existing.

All I saw of the Ódáða Hraun was a common lava-field, probably based upon Palagonite. It seemed of old date, judging from the long dust-lines and the stripes tonguing out into ashes and cindery sand. The surface was uneven, but not mountainous; long dorsa striped the ejected matter, and the latter abounded in hollows and ravines, caverns and boilers. Many parts retained the snow even at a low level, and thus water cannot be wholly wanting even in the driest season. Here and there were tracts of greenish tint, probably grass and willows, lichens and mosses; possibly of the lava with bottle-like glaze over which I afterwards rode. The prospect to the south-south-west ended with a blue and white buttress, an outlier of the Vatnajökull, which might be the (Eastern) Skjaldbreið.

We proposed to return by the eastern road _viâ_ the Búrfell, but our guide declared that the lava was almost impassable, and that the hardest work would not take us to Reykjahlíð before the morning. Having neither food, tobacco, nor liquor, and being half frozen by the cold, we returned _viâ_ the Afréttr; we passed to the east of Hverfjall, not gaining by the change of path; and after a ride of eight hours and a half we found ourselves “at home” shortly before eleven P.M. My feet did not recover warmth till three _A.M._

August 9th was an idle day for the horses, which required rest before a long march to the wilderness; the weather also was rainy, and more threatening than ever. I proceeded to examine the Hlíðarnámar, or Ledge-springs, and to see what boring work had been done by my companions.[166] The “smell of rotten eggs,” the effects of “suffocating fumes” upon “respiratory organs,” which by the by can only benefit from them, and the chance of being “snatched from a yawning abyss by the stalwart arms of the guide”--we were our own guides--had now scanty terrors for our daring souls. They have been weighty considerations with some travellers; their attitude reminds me of two Alpine climbers who, instead of crossing it, sat down and debated whether, as fathers of families, they would be justified in attempting that snow-bridge. Perhaps the conviction that the “abyss” here rarely exceeds in depth three feet, where it meets with the ground-rock, Palagonite, may account for our exceptional calmness. The reader will note that I speak only of the Hlíðarnámar: in 1874 they tell me a traveller was severely scalded at some hot spring.

The Hlíðarnámar west of the Námafjall, which Henderson calls the “Sulphur Mountain,” are on a lower plane than the Námar proper, east of the divide. They are bounded on the north by the double lava-stream which, during the last century, issued from the north-east, near the base of the Hlíðarfjall: to the south stretch independent “stone-floods,” studded with a multitude of hornitos, little vents, and foci. The area of our fragment of the great solfatara extending from the mountain, where it is richest, to the lava which has burnt it out, may be one square mile. It is not pretty scenery save to the capitalist’s eye, this speckled slope of yellow splotches, set in dark red and chocolate-coloured bolus, here and there covered with brown gravel, all fuming and puffing, and making the delicate and tender-hued Icelandic flora look dingy as a S’a Leone mulatto.

We began with the lowlands, where the spade, deftly plied by the handy Bowers, threw up in many places flowers of sulphur, and almost pure mineral. Below the gold-tinted surface we generally found a white layer, soft, acid, and mixed with alum; under this again occurred the bright red, the chocolate, and other intermediate colours, produced either by molecular change, the result of high temperature; or by oxygen, which the steam and sulphur have no longer power to modify. Here the material was heavy and viscid, clogging the spade. Between the yellow outcrops stretched gravelly tracts, which proved to be as rich as those of more specious appearance. Many of the issues were alive, and the dead vents were easily resuscitated by shallow boring; in places a puff and fizz immediately followed the removal of the altered lava blocks which cumbered the surface. In places we crushed through the upper crust, and thus “falling in” merely means dirtying the boots. Mr Augustus Völlker, I am told, has determined the bright yellow matter to be almost pure (95·68:100). The supply, which has now been idle for thirty years, grows without artificial aid, but the vast quantities which now waste their sourness on the desert air, and which deposit only a thin superficial layer, might be collected by roofing the vents with pans, as in Mexico, or by building plank sheds upon the lava blocks, which appear already cut for masonry. According to the old traveller, Ólafsson, the supply is readily renewed; and Dr Mouat (“The Andaman Islanders”) covers all the waste in two or three years.

Leaving our nags in a patch of wild oats, which, they say, the Devil planted to delude man, we walked up the Námafjall, whose white, pink, and yellow stripes proved to be sulphur-stones and sand washed down by the rain so as to colour the red oxidised clay. Here we picked up crystals of alum and lime, and fragments of selenite and gypsum converted by heat into a stone-like substance. The several crests, looking like ruined towers from below, proved to be box-shaped masses of Palagonite and altered lava; the summits, not very trustworthy to the tread, gave comprehensive prospects of the lowlands and the lake. Upon the chine we also found mud-springs, blubbering, gurgling, spluttering, plop-plopping, and mud-flinging, as though they had been bits of the Inferno: the feature is therefore not confined, as some writers assert, to the hill-feet facing the Öræfi. The richest diggings begin east of the crest, and here the vapour escapes with a treble of fizz and a bass of sumph, which the vivid fancy of the Icelandic traveller has converted into a “roar.” My companions were much excited by the spectacle of the great _soufrière_, and by the thought of so much wealth lying dormant in these days of “labour activised by capital,” when sulphur, “the mainstay,” says Mr Crookes, “of our present industrial chemistry,” has risen from £4, 10s. to £7 a ton, when 15 to 20 per cent. is a paying yield in the Sicilian mines, and when the expensive old system of working the ore has been rendered simple and economical as charcoal-burning. And we should have looked rather surprised if informed that all these mines were shortly to be extinguished by a scientific member of the Society of Arts.

In the evening, which unexpectedly proved the last when we three met in Iceland, the conversation naturally fell upon sulphur and sulphur-digging. The opinion expressed by Professor Jönstrüp, who in 1871 had used the six-inch boards, was also duly discussed. He was undoubtedly right in believing that for exploitation foreigners can do more than natives, and that money spent by the Danish Government would only weight the Icelander’s pocket. But he gave a flourishing account to Mr Alfred G. Lock, who, after wooing the coy party since 1866, has obtained a concession for fifty years; the only limiting condition being that he is not to wash in running waters, an absurdity demanded by local prejudices. For many years the Iceland diggings were a “bone of contention” between England and France. In 1845, M. Robert, the same who quietly proposed robbing the Iceland spar, wrote, “Aussi doît-il bien se garder de jamais accorder aux Anglais qui l’ont sollicitée, la faculté d’exploiter ces soufrières; comme on l’a fait en Laponie a l’égard des mines de cuivre.” Let us hope that under the enlightened rule of philanthropic Liberal Governments, nations have improved in 1874. But as the Iceland fisheries prove, the French rulers have ably and substantially supported their fellow-subjects, whereas ours find it easier and more dignified to do nothing, and to “let all slide.” Nothing proves England to be a great nation more conclusively than what she does despite the incubus from above. Nothing is more surprising than to see the man whom you have known for years to be well born, well bred, and well worthy of respect, suddenly, under the influence of office or of public life, degenerating into the timid Conservative, or the rampant, turbulent Radical. But the do-nothing policy of late years must give way the moment pressure is put upon it, and popular opinion requires only more light for seeing the way to a complete change.

I did not visit the House-wich of old Garðar Svafarson nor the road by which the Mý-vatn sulphur has been shipped in small quantities to Copenhagen, but Mr Charles Lock kindly sent me a sober and sensible description, which is given in his own words.

“The Húsavík line is very good, being for the most part over gently undulating downs, with basalt a few feet below the surface; crossing no streams of importance, and having a fall of 1500 feet in a distance of 45 miles.[167] It is wrongly shown in Gunnlaugsson’s map, for instead of being on the eastern side of Lángavatn it skirts the western shore of that lake, and it likewise passes on the western side of Uxahver.

“Húsavík harbour is a very good one, judging from the description given us by Captain Thrupp, R.N., of H.M.S. ‘Valorous,’ who spent some time there this summer. An old Danish skipper said it was perfectly safe when proper moorings were laid down, no vessel having been lost in it during the last thirty years. He has been trading between Copenhagen, Hull, and Húsavík for twenty-five years past, reaching the latter port each year about the end of February, and making his last voyage home in October. Between October and February there is generally a quantity of ice floating off the coast, which hinders vessels entering the harbour.”[168]

I also asked my young _compagnon de voyage_ to collect for me, upon the spot, certain details of the earthquake which occurred in the north-eastern part of the island, and which, as was noticed in the Introduction, did some damage at Húsavík. On the afternoon of April 16, three shocks were felt; two others followed during the afternoon of April 17; the second was remarkably violent, and throughout the night the ground continued, with short intervals of repose, to show lively agitation, which on the 18th reached its culmination. All the wooden huts were thrown down, and the stone houses were more or less shaken, the factory alone remaining in any measure habitable. Some cattle were killed; there was no loss of human life, but from twenty to thirty families were compelled to seek shelter in the outskirts. Nobody remained in the dilapidated little market-town except the Sýslumaðr, whose family left for Copenhagen in the steamer “Harriet,” bringing the news to Europe--I met them on their return to Reykjavik, and they confessed having been terribly startled and shaken. During the three days after the 18th, the vibrations continued with diminished violence; they were unimportant in the immediate neighbourhood of Húsavík; they were insignificant about Krafla, and when the vessel sailed they had wholly ceased. There was also a report that the crater in the icy depths of the Vatnajökull had begun to “vomit fire.”

This much the _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_ had informed me: Mr Charles Lock added the following details: “During the eight days of earthquake the thermometer (R.), during the night, fell as low as-8°. The direction of the shocks was from east to west, and some of them were very severe. The inhabitants were so much frightened that they crowded on board a vessel which chanced to be in port. I was not told that the effects were at all felt in the harbour. The Sýslumaðr slept in one of the streets for several nights. Many small cracks were left in the ground when the shocks had subsided; but these have since been filled up: some naturally, others by the peasants.”

Let us now “hark back” to Mý-vatn.

As a wandering son of Israel once said to me, in my green and salad days, “Gold may be bought too dear.” The question is not whether sulphur exists in Iceland; it is simply “Can we import sulphur from Iceland cheaper than from elsewhere?” Calculations as to profit will evidently hinge upon the cost of melting the ore at the pit’s mouth, and of conveying it to a port of shipment: however cheap and abundant it may be in the interior, if fuel be scarce and roads and carriage wanting, it cannot be expected to pay. My opinion is that we can, if science and capital be applied to the mines. The digging season would be the hot season; and the quantity is so great that many a summer will come and go before the thousands of tons which compose every separate patch can be exhausted. But this part of the work need not be confined to the fine weather: it is evident, even if experience of the past did not teach us, that little snow can rest upon the hot and steaming soil. As one place fails, or rather rests to recover vigour, the road can be pushed forward to another--I am persuaded that the whole range, wherever Palagonite is found, will yield more or less of the mineral.

The first produce could be sent down in winter to Húsavík by the Sleði (sledge). When income justifies the outlay, a tramroad on the Haddan system would cheapen transit. The ships which export the sulphur can import coal to supply heat where the boiling springs do not suffice, together with pressed hay and oats for the horses and cattle used in the works. As appears in the Appendix, turf and peat have been burned, and the quantity of this fuel is literally inexhaustible. It will be advisable to buy sundry of the farms, and those about Mý-vatn range in value between £300 and a maximum of £800. The waste lands to the east will carry sheep sufficient for any number of workmen. The hands might be Icelanders, trained to regular work, and superintended by English overseers, or, if judged advisable, all might be British miners. Good stone houses and stoves will enable the foreigner to weather a winter which the native, in his wretched shanty of peat and boards, regards with apprehension. Of the general salubrity of the climate I have no doubt.

The sulphur trade will prove the most legitimate that the island can afford. Exploitation of these deposits, which become more valuable every year, promises a source of wealth to a poor and struggling country; free from the inconveniences of the pony traffic, and from the danger of exporting the sheep and cattle required for home supply. And the foreigner may expect to enrich, not only the native, but himself, as long at least as he works honestly and economically, and he avoids the errors which, in the Brazil and elsewhere, have too often justified the old Spanish proverb, “A silver mine brings wretchedness; a gold mine, ruin.”

These statements, printed in the _Standard_ (November 1, 1872), have lately been criticised by a certain “Brimstone” (_Mining Journal_, August 29, and September 19, 1874). He is kind enough to say, “I have the greatest respect for Captain Burton as a traveller, but none whatever as an inspector of mining properties”--where, however, a little candour and common sense go a long way. And he is honest enough to own, despite all interests in pyrites or Sicilian mines, that the “working of the sulphur deposits in question may possibly, with great care and economy, give moderate returns on capital.” His letters have been satisfactorily answered by Dr C. Carter Blake and Mr Jón A. Hjaltalín. It only remains for me to remark that nothing is easier than to draw depreciatory conclusions from one’s own peculiar premises. “Brimstone,” for instance, reduces the working days to 150, when the road would be open all the year round to carts and sledges; he considers the use of sledges upon snow a “fantastic idea,” and he condemns the horses to “eat, month after month, the oats of idleness,” whereas they can be profitably employed throughout the twelve months either at the diggings or in transporting the ore. The statistics of Iceland emigration prove that even during the fine season a sufficiency of hands might, if well and regularly paid, be “withdrawn into the desert from fishing and agricultural operations,” which, after all, are confined to the Heyannir, or hay-making season, and which take up but a small fraction of the year, between the middle of July to the half of September. Moreover, there is little, if any, fishing on the coasts near the northern mines. The report of the Althing shows that ten, and sometimes twenty, labourers worked at the Krísuvík diggings, where fishing is busiest, during almost the whole winter of 1868-69, and the silica mining of Reykjanes was not interrupted during December and January 1872-73. The spell is from five to six hours during the darkest months, the shortest day in Iceland being five hours. About mid-March the island night is not longer than in England, and from early May there is continual daylight till August, when the nights begin to “close in.” The hands in the southern mines were paid from 3½d. to 6d. per hour. Professor Paijkull made the northern sulphur cost 3 marks per cwt., and the horses carried 3 to 3½ cwts. in two days to the trading station: Metcalfe also declares that 200 cwts. per annum were melted at Húsavík, and that the price was half that of Sicilian. “Brimstone” complains that the distance from the coast is variously laid down at 25 (direct geographical), 28⅘, 40, and 45 (statute) miles, when the map and the itineraries of many travellers are ready to set him right. He need hardly own that he has no personal knowledge of Húsavík, Krísuvík, or any part of Iceland, when he sets down “such necessary little items as loading, lighterage, harbour-dues, improving Husavik, brokerage, et cætera,” confounding the ideas of Snowland and England. After a startled glance at the cost of British labour, “and, worse still, of idleness during the greater part of the year”--a phantom of his own raising--he asks, “What about the demoralisation consequent on the latter, and on the inevitable use and abuse of the spirits of the country, in order to while away the time?” The Brazil is surely as thirsty a land as Iceland, yet my host, Mr Gordon, of the gold mines in Minas Geraes, would be somewhat surprised, and perhaps not a little scandalised, to hear that his white, brown, and black hands cannot be kept from drink. Briefly the objector’s cavils may be answered in the “untranslatable poetry” of the American backwoodsman, “T’aint no squar’ game; he’s jest put up the keerds on that chap (Sicily) from the start.” I have no idea who Mr “Brimstone” is, but I must say that he deserves a touch of his own mineral, hot withal, for so notably despising the Englishman’s especial virtue--Fair Play.

On the other hand, my notes on the Mý-vatn mines drew from a Brazilian acquaintance, Mr Arthur Rowbottom, the following note, containing an inquiry which unfortunately I could not answer:

“I read your account of the sulphur mines of Myvatn with great interest and pleasure; and from your report I should feel disposed to believe that boracic acid exists in the same district. You will, no doubt, remember the conversation we had on board the ‘Douro,’ returning from Brazil, about the very large fortune made by Count Larderel out of the boracic acid produced in the Tuscan lagoons situated near Castelnuovo. Wherever native alum and brimstone are found, there are always traces of borate of soda in one form or another. Boracic acid exists at the Torre del Greco, and in Volcano of the Lipari Islands.[169] The locality where the ‘Tincal’ is found in Thibet is reported to be plutonic; in fact, nearly all the countries from whence the borate of soda is drawn are somewhat similar to the sulphur districts of Iceland; and I should feel greatly obliged if you could inform me if boracic acid or borate of lime exists in the island.”