ees 
CXXXVil 
which have the dubious merit of a singular persistency. They make 
their way into the boots, under the trousers, and up the nostrils, until, 
in my friend’s case, the guide, with an Icelander’s patient endurance, 
retired to a lava block, covered his face with his hands, and surrendered. 
The only vegetables I saw in Iceland were potatoes and turnips, but 
although they will ripen they are selcom grown. In sheltered place, 
there are many wild flowers. I have picked or seen buttercups, violets, 
forget-me nots, wild geraniums, thyme, dogdaisy, catchfly, seapink, 
with others whose names I did not know. 
Hekla, the Geysers, even the sulphur springs of Kriusivik, have 
been so often described that it would be an impertinence to say much 
of them here. Hekla is in every way unworthy of her world-wide 
fame. Built up of sand and clay, the mountain, like so many more in 
Iceland, rises abruptly from a plain, a long low flat ridge, 5,000ft. in 
height, marxed by three cones. Hekla is but one of eighteen inter- 
mittently active volcanic mountains in the island, and has not even to 
boast of being the most destructive—a distinction belonging to the 
Skapta Jokul, which in 1783 threw out a mass of lava greater in bulk 
than Mount Blanc, greater than has ever been known elsewhere in the 
world. But Hekla is isolated, can be seen from the sea, is easily ap- 
proached, and has twenty-five times in the course of one thousand 
years spread desolation ; circumstances to which she doubtless owes 
her reputation. Once only did I see Hekla as a thing of beauty, and 
happily it was for the first time, so that the impression remains as the 
clearest and most prominent. At Oddi the church and priest’s house 
are built on the edge of a plateau some height above the lava fields 
Wet, tired, hungry, and thirsty, after riding all day and half the night, 
fording two rivers, and running a madcap race after midnight over the 
boulders with an Icelandic farmer, who insisted upon trying issues with 
“the walking priest,” as they called me, I dismounted on the platform 
before the long line of low-gabled buildings that made the priest’s home, 
It was about two in the morning. Turning round, I saw far away 
on the edge of the desert plains, through a pure, still, yet dimmed 
light, that most beautiful atmosphere of an arctic summer night, 
the white mountain mass, standing out from its azure background. 
There, alone, and then, she looked worthy of the place men have 
given her. 
The last eruption of Hekla was in 1878, and I ascended the moun- 
tain in order to see the new crater formed on one of its outlying 
spurs. We started on ponies from a solitary farm-house set down 
amidst some grass land, girt about by a vast level barren plain. Cross- 
ing a river, deep-sunk between precipitous banks, after riding some 
hours over sand and pumice, we tethered our ponies on the only 
bit of green sward between the farm and Hekla, The ascent was wholly 
over boulders and lava beds, on which lay a few patches of snow in the 
sheltered hollows. The lava of 1841, which we skirted, was easily dis- 
tinguishable by its glossy black appearance, and the knobby vitrification 
of its blocks. The last arréte is reached by a long narrow ridge, with 
a somewhat steep fall on either side, across which the wind swept 
viciously. After reaching the summit, and whilst picking my way up 
the slope of the crater of 78, one leg sunk suddenly to the knee 
through a yellow, clayish substance, and with it, when I drew it out, 
came a considerable outburst of smoke, with an evil smell. I suppose 
it is owing to the presence of heat close to the surface everywhere, 
that the crater is not a basin, within which the volcanic force has been 
exercised. It is rather a large portion of the mountain slope, through 
which the lava had burst in many places, tossing about the surface 
soil over a considerable area, This eruption had covered the plain 
in one direction with new lava as far as the eye could reach, and 
