and the north-east Coast of Iceland. 9 



the peninsula, and on one of the former I saw a flock o£ 

 ten Whooper Swans and a Goosander with young. Great 

 numbers of Dunlins and Golden Plovers frequented the 

 stony ground above the lochs. The melancholy " wheep " 

 of the latter became almost wearisome, but seemed in keep- 

 ing with the desolate region in which they lived. Houses 

 were few and far between, and there were no tracks, but the 

 direction from one farm to another was marked by large 

 cairns. These cairns, however, are so far apart that I did 

 not 'find them very helpful in a fog, and deviation from the 

 right path was only ascertained by landing in an impassable 

 bog. I came upon a breeding-place of the Purple Sand- 

 piper. The birds were seen singly or in pairs, and they 

 fluttered round me with trailing wing trying to draw me 

 away whilst I searched for nests or young. In Slater's 

 ' Birds of Iceland,' the author says that he has never met with 

 their nests lower than 1200 to 1500 feet above the sea, but 

 the birds which I saw here were breeding at certainly less 

 than 200 feet above sea-level. Hed-necked Phalaropes were 

 plentiful on the shore of Thistilfjord, and I also saw White 

 Wagtails and Snow-Buntings with young. On a hill over- 

 looking the anchorage I found some Rock-Ptarmigan. 



As low, flat, marshy ground is often the best field for 

 the ornithologist, I was attracted by the appearance of 

 Heradsfloi on the chart and made this my next anchorage. 



I arrived there at 8 p.m. on the 15th of July and went on 

 shore after dinner. A more weird spot I have never been 

 in. A stretch of land 13 to 15 miles wide and extending 

 far inland is entirely composed of black sandy lava, the 

 alluvial deposit of two large rivers. If the charts are to be 

 believed (in these regions we find that they are often 

 untrustworthy), the course of these rivers is at times well 

 defined, but at the date of my visit, probably owing to melt- 

 ing snow, they had widened out into a great lake. Nothing 

 grows on this vast expanse of sandy lava except a very 

 coarse grass, which here and there has managed to get a hold 

 and forms a small mound. W^alkiug in the soft sand was a 

 Herculean labour, and landing on the shore was attended 



