Letters From High Latitudes [38]
as if summoned by enchantment, a dull grey mist closed around us, and suddenly confounded in undistinguishable ruin the glory and the terror of the panorama we had traversed; sky, mountains, horizon, all had disappeared; and as we strained our eyes from the edge of the Rabna Gja across the monotonous grey level at our feet, it was almost difficult to believe that there lay the same magical plain, the first sight of which had become almost an epoch in our lives.
I had sent on cook, baggage, and guides, some hours before we ourselves started, so that on our arrival we found a dry, cosy tent, and a warm dinner awaiting us. The rapid transformation of the aspect of the country, which I had just witnessed, made me quite understand how completely the success of an expedition in Iceland must depend on the weather, and fully accounted for the difference I had observed in the amount of enjoyment different travellers seemed to have derived from it. It is one thing to ride forty miles a day through the most singular scenery in the world, when a radiant sun brings out every feature of the country into startling distinctness, transmuting the dull tormented earth into towers, domes, and pinnacles of gleaming metal,--and weaves for every distant summit a robe of variegated light, such as the "Delectable Mountains" must have worn for the rapt gaze of weary "Christian;"--and another to plod over the same forty miles, drenched to the skin, seeing nothing but the dim, grey roots of hills, that rise you know not how, and you care not where,--with no better employment than to look at your watch, and wonder when you shall reach your journey's end. If, in addition to this, you have to wait, as very often must be the case, for many hours after your own arrival, wet, tired, hungry, until the baggage-train, with the tents and food, shall have come up, with no alternative in the meantime but to lie shivering inside a grass-roofed church, or to share the quarters of some farmer's family, whose domestic arrangements resemble in every particular those which Macaulay describes as prevailing among the Scottish Highlanders a hundred years ago; and, if finally--after vainly waiting for some days to see an eruption which never takes place--you journey back to Reykjavik under the same melancholy conditions,--it will not be unnatural that, on returning to your native land, you should proclaim Iceland, with her Geysirs, to be a sham, a delusion, and a snare!
Fortune, however, seemed determined that of these bitternesses we should not taste; for the next morning, bright and joyous overhead bent the blue unclouded heaven; while the plain lay gleaming at our feet in all the brilliancy of enamel. I was sorely tempted to linger another day in the neighbourhood; but we have already spent more time upon the Geysirs than I had counted upon, and it will not do to remain in Iceland longer than the 15th, or Winter will have begun to barricade the passes into his Arctic dominions. My plan, on returning to Reykjavik, is to send the schooner round to wait for us in a harbour on the north coast of the island, while we ourselves strike straight across the interior on horseback.
The scenery, I am told, is magnificent. On the way we shall pass many a little nook, shut up among the hills, that has been consecrated by some touching old-world story; and the manner of life among the northern inhabitants is, I believe, more unchanged and characteristic than that of any other of the islanders. Moreover, scarcely any stranger has ever penetrated to any distance in this direction; and we shall have an opportunity of traversing a slice of that tremendous desert--piled up for thirty thousand square miles in disordered pyramids of ice and lava over the centre of the country, and periodically devastated by deluges of molten stone and boiling mud, or overwhelmed with whirlwinds of intermingled snow and cinders,--an unfinished corner of the universe, where the elements of chaos are still allowed to rage with unbridled fury.
Our last stage from Thingvalla back to Reykjavik was
I had sent on cook, baggage, and guides, some hours before we ourselves started, so that on our arrival we found a dry, cosy tent, and a warm dinner awaiting us. The rapid transformation of the aspect of the country, which I had just witnessed, made me quite understand how completely the success of an expedition in Iceland must depend on the weather, and fully accounted for the difference I had observed in the amount of enjoyment different travellers seemed to have derived from it. It is one thing to ride forty miles a day through the most singular scenery in the world, when a radiant sun brings out every feature of the country into startling distinctness, transmuting the dull tormented earth into towers, domes, and pinnacles of gleaming metal,--and weaves for every distant summit a robe of variegated light, such as the "Delectable Mountains" must have worn for the rapt gaze of weary "Christian;"--and another to plod over the same forty miles, drenched to the skin, seeing nothing but the dim, grey roots of hills, that rise you know not how, and you care not where,--with no better employment than to look at your watch, and wonder when you shall reach your journey's end. If, in addition to this, you have to wait, as very often must be the case, for many hours after your own arrival, wet, tired, hungry, until the baggage-train, with the tents and food, shall have come up, with no alternative in the meantime but to lie shivering inside a grass-roofed church, or to share the quarters of some farmer's family, whose domestic arrangements resemble in every particular those which Macaulay describes as prevailing among the Scottish Highlanders a hundred years ago; and, if finally--after vainly waiting for some days to see an eruption which never takes place--you journey back to Reykjavik under the same melancholy conditions,--it will not be unnatural that, on returning to your native land, you should proclaim Iceland, with her Geysirs, to be a sham, a delusion, and a snare!
Fortune, however, seemed determined that of these bitternesses we should not taste; for the next morning, bright and joyous overhead bent the blue unclouded heaven; while the plain lay gleaming at our feet in all the brilliancy of enamel. I was sorely tempted to linger another day in the neighbourhood; but we have already spent more time upon the Geysirs than I had counted upon, and it will not do to remain in Iceland longer than the 15th, or Winter will have begun to barricade the passes into his Arctic dominions. My plan, on returning to Reykjavik, is to send the schooner round to wait for us in a harbour on the north coast of the island, while we ourselves strike straight across the interior on horseback.
The scenery, I am told, is magnificent. On the way we shall pass many a little nook, shut up among the hills, that has been consecrated by some touching old-world story; and the manner of life among the northern inhabitants is, I believe, more unchanged and characteristic than that of any other of the islanders. Moreover, scarcely any stranger has ever penetrated to any distance in this direction; and we shall have an opportunity of traversing a slice of that tremendous desert--piled up for thirty thousand square miles in disordered pyramids of ice and lava over the centre of the country, and periodically devastated by deluges of molten stone and boiling mud, or overwhelmed with whirlwinds of intermingled snow and cinders,--an unfinished corner of the universe, where the elements of chaos are still allowed to rage with unbridled fury.
Our last stage from Thingvalla back to Reykjavik was