86 LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. [VII. 



hood ; but we have already spent more time upon the Gey- 

 sirs 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 tre- 

 mendous 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 got 

 over very quickly, and seemed an infinitely shorter distance 

 than when we first performed it. We met a number of 

 farmers returning to their homes from a kind of fair that is 

 annually held in the little metropolis ; and as I watched the 

 long caravan-like line of pack-horses and horsemen, wearily 

 plodding over the stony waste in single file, I found it less 

 difficult to believe that these remote islanders should be 

 descended from Oriental forefathers. In fact, one is con- 

 stantly reminded of the East in Iceland. From the earliest 

 ages the Icelanders have been a people dwelling in tents. 

 In the time of the ancient Parliament, the legislators, during 

 the entire session, lay encamped in movable booths around 

 the place of meeting. Their domestic polity is naturally 

 patriarchal, and the flight of their ancestors from Norway 



