V.J FIRST SIGHT OF ICELAND. 17 



look out for land. The weather had greatly improved 

 during the night ; and, for the first time since leaving the 

 Hebrides, the sun had got the better of the clouds, and 

 driven them in confusion before his face. The sea, losing 

 its dead leaden colour, had become quite crisp and burnished, 

 darkling into a deep sapphire blue against the horizon ; 

 beyond which, at about nine o'clock, there suddenly shot 

 up towards the zenith, a pale, gold aureole, such as precedes 

 the appearance of the good fairy at a pantomime farce ; 

 then, gradually lifting its huge back above the water, rose a 

 silver pyramid of snow, which I knew must be the cone of 

 an ice mountain, miles away in the interior of the island. 

 From the moment we got hold of the land, our cruise, as 

 you may suppose, doubled in interest. Unfortunately, how- 

 ever, the fair morning did not keep its promise ; about one 

 o'clock, the glittering mountain vanished in mist ; the sky 

 again became like an inverted pewter cup, and we had to 

 return for two more days to our old practice of threshing 

 to windward. So provoked was I at this relapse of the 

 weather, that, perceiving a whale blowing convenient, I could 

 not help suggesting to Sigurdr, son of Jonas, that it was an 

 occasion for observing the traditions of his family ; but he 

 excused himself on the plea of their having become obsolete. 

 The mountain we had seen in the morning was the south- 

 east extremity of the island, the very landfall made by one 

 of its first discoverers. 1 This gentleman not having a com- 

 pass, (he lived about a.d. 864,) nor knowing exactly where 



1 There is in Strabo an account of a voyage made by a citizen of the 

 Greek colony of Marseilles, in the time of Alexander the Great, through 

 the Pillars of Hercules, along the coasts of France and Spain, up the 

 English Channel, and so across the North Sea, past an island he calls 

 Thule ; his further progress, he asserted, was hindered by a barrier of 

 a peculiar nature, — neither earth, air, nor sky, but a compound of all 

 three, forming a thick viscid substance which it was impossible to 

 penetrate. Now, whether this same Thule was one of the Shetland 

 Islands, and the impassable substance merely a fog, — or Iceland, and 

 the barricade beyond, a wall of ice, it is impossible to say. Probably 

 Pythias did not get beyond the Shetlands. 



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