don’t have a little action. The arms are all right, but the legs want exercise.”
We were advancing at a rapid pace. The country was already almost a desert. Here and there was a lonely farm, called a boër, built either of wood, or of sods, or of pieces of lava, looking like a poor beggar by the wayside. These ruinous huts seemed to solicit charity from passersby; and on very small provocation we should have given alms for the relief of the poor inmates. In this country there were no roads and paths, and the poor vegetation, however slow, would soon efface the rare travellers’ footsteps.
Yet this part of the province, at a very small distance from the capital, is reckoned among the inhabited and cultivated portions of Iceland. What, then, must other tracts be, more desert than this desert? In the first half mile we had not seen one farmer standing before his cabin door, nor one shepherd tending a flock less wild than himself, nothing but a few cows and sheep left to themselves. What then would be those convulsed regions upon which we were advancing, regions subject to the dire phenomena of eruptions, the offspring of volcanic explosions and subterranean convulsions?
We were to know them before long, but on consulting Olsen’s map, I saw that they would be avoided by winding along the seashore. In fact, the great plutonic action is confined to the central portion of the island; there, rocks of the “trappean” and volcanic class, including trachyte, basalt, and tuffs and agglomerates associated with streams of lava, have made this a land of supernatural horrors. I had no idea of the spectacle which was awaiting us in the peninsula of Snæfells, where these ruins of a fiery nature have formed a frightful chaos.
In two hours from Reykjavík we arrived at the burgh of Gufunes, called aðalkirkja , or principal church. There was nothing remarkable here but a few houses, scarcely enough for a German hamlet.