So POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



and coffee. Still the hospitality was sincere and appreciated, though 

 for the honor of its recipients it may be stated that it was paid for. 

 The guide and myself bunked in the room where the above banquet 

 was displayed, each on a feather bed with another one on top of that 

 as covering. 



After leaving Thingvallir we followed a rude trail over stony 

 ground in the rifted country. The ground rose, until we dominated 

 the broad expanse of the Thingvallir vatn, the superb and enormous 

 expanse of water lying between hills and mountains, with some steeply 

 slanting wedge-formed mountains shooting out of its placid waters, 

 as if partially submerged by the eastward tipping of its basin. The 

 view backward in the clear air, in which no trace of contamination 

 lingered, was indeed beautiful, and the little red-roofed church as a 

 spot of color in the scene brought with it the needed suggestion of 

 some sort of human occupancy. 



We stumbled along up natural steps of rock, near the edge of the 

 lake, sharply rising, and later crossed the dry and contorted linea- 

 ments of the Hrafnagja (raven's wing) ; another rift, companion to 

 the mighty Almannaja, less august, and more rudely formed. We 

 were now in the " lava beds," a tangled barren region strewn with 

 fragments of rock and thinly invaded by soil and flowers. It seemed 

 almost as if we were on the back of the land, and looking off to its 

 dispersed members below us. The rocks about us were vesicular, 

 slaggy and scoriaceous. Some blistered pieces might have come from a 

 shaft furnace. This region was most desolate, marked also by low 

 shafts or irregular prominences of rock, while with festive hopefulness 

 cow-berry and plantain, grass of Parnassus, ground pinks and other 

 flowers decorated the niches or clung charmingly to the ledges and 

 interstices of the rocks. 



All the while the superb pictures north and south changed and 

 developed. We were now approaching a most congruously strange 

 and sterile cinder range; crater-like peaks deeply disintegrated, with 

 long absolutely bare slopes of black and red palagonitic fragments, 

 piled up at the limital angle of rest like the slack from a mine, or the 

 slag from a furnace. We seemed to be in a burnt-out world, as if we 

 might be traversing the surface of the moon. The original palisaded 

 structure of these mountains was destroyed, until they had become 

 heaped-up cones of rubble with very dark cavities. They were the 

 Kalfstindar in which Thoroddsen found intrusive basalts. 



We descended from the " lava beds " by a steep path to a broad 

 grassy flat meadow that skirted the very foot of the sinister Kalf- 

 stindar. The coloring, in brown, black and purple was extremely fine, 

 and the sharp points of some hills falling away in long slopes of 

 debris, with, here and there, remaining bulwarks of the parallel inter- 



