74 THE POLAR WORLD. 



enormous Almannacrjn, or Allnuui's Kift, suddenly gapes beneath his feet — a 

 colossal rent extending above a niik' in lL'ii^th,and inclosed on both sides by 

 abi-iijit walls of black lava, frequently upward of a liundred feet high, and sep- 

 ai'Mted from about fiffv to se\t'ntv h'vt fi'um cae-li other. 





THE ALMANNAGJA. 



A corresponding chasm, but of inferior dimensions, the Ilrafnagja, or Ra- 

 ven's Rift, opens its black rampart to the east, about eight miles fartlicr on ; 

 and both form the boundaries of the verdant plain of Thingvalla, which by a 

 grand convulsion of nature has itself been shattered into innumerable small 

 parallel crevices and fissures fifty or sixty feet deep. 



Of the Ilrafnagja Mr. Ross Browne says : " A toilsome ride of eight miles 

 brouglit us to the edge of the Pass, Avhich in point of rugged grandeur far 

 surpasses the Almamiagja, though it lacks the extent and symmetry which give 

 the latter such a remarkable effect. Ilei-e was a tremendous gap in the earth, 

 over a liundred feet deep, hacked and shivered into a thousand fantastic shapes,- 

 the sides a succession of the wildest accidents; the bottom a chaos of broken 

 lava, all tossed about in llio most terrific confusion. It is not, however, tlie ex- 

 traordinary desolation of the scene that constitutes its principal interest. The 

 resistless power which had rent the great Ijiva-bed asunder, as if touched with 

 pity at ttie ruin, had also flung from the tottering cliffs a causeway across the 

 gap, -which now forms the only means of passing over the great Ilrafnagja. 

 No human hands could have created such a colossal work as this ; the imagi- 

 nation is lost in its massive grandeur ; and when -we reflect that miles of an 

 almost impassable country -would otherwise have to be traversed in order to 



