Letters From High Latitudes [53]
prince of song, who--left during life to languish in a garret--is buried by nobles in Westminster Abbey. A few minutes more the last fiery segment had disappeared beneath the purple horizon, and all was over.
"The king is dead--the king is dead--the king is dead! Long live the king!" And up from the sea that had just entombed his sire, rose the young monarch of a new day; while the courtier clouds, in their ruby robes, turned faces still aglow with the favours of their dead lord, to borrow brighter blazonry from the smile of a new master.
A fairer or a stranger spectacle than the last Arctic sunset cannot well be conceived: Evening and Morning--like kinsmen whose hearts some baseless feud has kept asunder --clasping hands across the shadow of the vanished night.
You must forgive me if sometimes I become a little magniloquent;--for really, amid the grandeur of that fresh primaeval world, it was almost impossible to prevent one's imagination from absorbing a dash of the local colouring. We seemed to have suddenly waked up among the colossal scenery of Keats' Hyperion. The pulses of young Titans beat within our veins. Time itself,--no longer frittered down into paltry divisions,--had assumed a more majestic aspect. We had the appetite of giants--was it unnatural we should also adopt "the large utterance of the early gods?"
As the "Reine Hortense" could not carry coals sufficient for the entire voyage we had set out upon, it had been arranged that the steamer "Saxon" should accompany her as a tender, and the Onunder Fiord, on the north-west coast of the island, had been appointed as the place of rendezvous. Suddenly wheeling round therefore to the right we quitted the open sea, and dived down a long grey lane of water that ran on as far as the eye could reach between two lofty ranges of porphyry and amygdaloid. The conformation of these mountains was most curious: it looked as if the whole district was the effect of some prodigious crystallization, so geometrical was the outline of each particular hill, sometimes rising cube-like, or pentagonal, but more generally built up into a perfect pyramid, with stairs mounting in equal gradations to the summit. Here and there the cone of the pyramid would be shaven off, leaving it flat-topped like a Babylonian altar or Mexican teocalli; and as the sun's level rays,--shooting across above our heads in golden rafters from ridge to ridge,--smote brighter on some loftier peak behind, you might almost fancy you beheld the blaze of sacrificial fires. The peculiar symmetrical appearance of these rocks arises from the fact of their being built up in layers of trap, alternating with Neptunian beds; the disintegrating action of snow and frost on the more exposed strata having gradually carved their sides into flights of terraces.
It is in these Neptunian beds that the famous surturbrand is found, a species of bituminous timber, black and shining like pitch coal; but whether belonging to the common carboniferous system, or formed from ancient drift-wood, is still a point of dispute among the learned. In this neighbourhood considerable quantities both of zerlite and chabasite are also found, but, generally speaking, Iceland is less rich in minerals than one would suppose; opal, calcedony, amethyst, malachite, obsidian, agate, and feldspar, being the principal. Of sulphur the supply is inexhaustible.
After steaming down for several hours between these terraced hills, we at last reached the extremity of the fiord, where we found the "Saxon" looking like a black sea-dragon coiled up at the bottom of his den. Up fluttered a signal to the mast-head of the corvette, and blowing off her steam, she wore round upon her heel, to watch the effects of her summons. As if roused by the challenge of an intruder, the sleepy monster seemed suddenly to bestir itself, and then pouring out volumes of sulphureous breath, set out with many an angry snort in pursuit of the rash troubler of its solitude. At least, such I am sure might have been the notion of the poor peasant inhabitants of two or three
"The king is dead--the king is dead--the king is dead! Long live the king!" And up from the sea that had just entombed his sire, rose the young monarch of a new day; while the courtier clouds, in their ruby robes, turned faces still aglow with the favours of their dead lord, to borrow brighter blazonry from the smile of a new master.
A fairer or a stranger spectacle than the last Arctic sunset cannot well be conceived: Evening and Morning--like kinsmen whose hearts some baseless feud has kept asunder --clasping hands across the shadow of the vanished night.
You must forgive me if sometimes I become a little magniloquent;--for really, amid the grandeur of that fresh primaeval world, it was almost impossible to prevent one's imagination from absorbing a dash of the local colouring. We seemed to have suddenly waked up among the colossal scenery of Keats' Hyperion. The pulses of young Titans beat within our veins. Time itself,--no longer frittered down into paltry divisions,--had assumed a more majestic aspect. We had the appetite of giants--was it unnatural we should also adopt "the large utterance of the early gods?"
As the "Reine Hortense" could not carry coals sufficient for the entire voyage we had set out upon, it had been arranged that the steamer "Saxon" should accompany her as a tender, and the Onunder Fiord, on the north-west coast of the island, had been appointed as the place of rendezvous. Suddenly wheeling round therefore to the right we quitted the open sea, and dived down a long grey lane of water that ran on as far as the eye could reach between two lofty ranges of porphyry and amygdaloid. The conformation of these mountains was most curious: it looked as if the whole district was the effect of some prodigious crystallization, so geometrical was the outline of each particular hill, sometimes rising cube-like, or pentagonal, but more generally built up into a perfect pyramid, with stairs mounting in equal gradations to the summit. Here and there the cone of the pyramid would be shaven off, leaving it flat-topped like a Babylonian altar or Mexican teocalli; and as the sun's level rays,--shooting across above our heads in golden rafters from ridge to ridge,--smote brighter on some loftier peak behind, you might almost fancy you beheld the blaze of sacrificial fires. The peculiar symmetrical appearance of these rocks arises from the fact of their being built up in layers of trap, alternating with Neptunian beds; the disintegrating action of snow and frost on the more exposed strata having gradually carved their sides into flights of terraces.
It is in these Neptunian beds that the famous surturbrand is found, a species of bituminous timber, black and shining like pitch coal; but whether belonging to the common carboniferous system, or formed from ancient drift-wood, is still a point of dispute among the learned. In this neighbourhood considerable quantities both of zerlite and chabasite are also found, but, generally speaking, Iceland is less rich in minerals than one would suppose; opal, calcedony, amethyst, malachite, obsidian, agate, and feldspar, being the principal. Of sulphur the supply is inexhaustible.
After steaming down for several hours between these terraced hills, we at last reached the extremity of the fiord, where we found the "Saxon" looking like a black sea-dragon coiled up at the bottom of his den. Up fluttered a signal to the mast-head of the corvette, and blowing off her steam, she wore round upon her heel, to watch the effects of her summons. As if roused by the challenge of an intruder, the sleepy monster seemed suddenly to bestir itself, and then pouring out volumes of sulphureous breath, set out with many an angry snort in pursuit of the rash troubler of its solitude. At least, such I am sure might have been the notion of the poor peasant inhabitants of two or three