98 Leonard Haivkes — Rock Stream in East Iceland. 



acid rocks in Iceland. Especially noteworthy is the mountain 

 Skumhottur, circa 3,000 feet high, into which a huge cirque extends. 

 The cirque walls are very steep, falling to a hroad gravelly plain 

 ahout 750 feet high, over which a river — the Hrauna — meanders 

 in a south-easterly direction till it cuts through a rise of ahout 

 50 feet, the beginning of the blockstreara, and takes a rapid course 

 through a gorge to the fjr>rd. The blockstream is a chaotic assemblage 

 of large angular blocks of liparite, a great number being twelve or 

 more feet in diameter, with an extremely uneven hummocky surface, 

 forming a wilderness known as the " Hraun ". 



"Hraun" is an old Norse word meaning "a rough place", 

 " a wilderness ", but in Iceland it came to signify " a lava field when 



Skvmbottvi- 



Scale 



mile * 



'■%: 







S rf 



<=V* 



<u,. 



«Mtt^^*VtW 



"*• st 



\d 



M 



pi 



W\^ 



3ara_ 

 B ° 5 * 



LODMUNDARFJORO 



«■%, 



m 



#N* h| 



%iw ] 



hmW^iaiiijf, 



Fig. 3. — Sketch-map of the Lodmundarfjord District. H = the Hjalmadal 

 B = the Bardarstadadal ; Sse = the farm Sseverendi ; St = the farm Stakkahlifi. 



cold", "a burnt place", being so used in the Sagas as well as in 

 modern times (3). Thoroddsen regards the blockstream as a lava- 

 flow extruded from Skumhottur. The rough block surfaces of some 

 acid lavas are well known and cited as a parallel, albeit the 

 exceptional unevenness of the " Hraun " is taken as an indication that 

 the lava was exceptionally viscous, and the daring suggestion is made 

 that the liparite was first intruded into the Tertiary basalts and 

 cooled down so slowly that when the plateau was dissected by 

 dislocation and erosion the still hot magma flowed out as a stream of 

 half-melted blocks (2, p. 161). A closer examination of the district 

 reveals little to support this hypothesis. It is clear that the greater 



