420 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



upon reflection, and made the quest a somewhat doubtful one ; 

 but my imagination was fired with the idea of watching such 

 birds amidst surroundings of utter and remote wildness. I had 

 sighed for Peregrines, and here were greater than Peregrines, so 

 I decided to make the expedition, thinking it would be worse to 

 miss through not going than to go in vain. I struck my leaky 

 tent, therefore, and, soon after 9, we started, the farmer, at 

 whose house Sigurdsson had slept, accompanying us for a short 

 distance to put us into the way. This, however, would have 

 been but little use, had there not been a pretty fair general 

 knowledge on the part of my guide. The greater and much the 

 more enjoyable part of the way was without road and often with- 

 out paths — meaning pony-paths — wild, waste, desolate country, 

 much of it swampy — tussocks of long, wiry grass and grey moss, 

 with soft, flat sponginesses between, that quaked as the ponies 

 went over them. Sometimes they foundered — Sigurdsson had 

 once to slide off and pull his out by the reins — but mine went no 

 farther than giving me fearful sensations of something much 

 more serious than this ; it seemed so bent upon sinking that I 

 wondered continually to see it still under me. But in all this 

 wildness and depopulation there was none of the dreariness of 

 solitude, for the Whimbrel and Golden Plover haunted it every- 

 where, and with their flittings and cries, all in keeping, made it 

 a pleasant desolation. Grass and grey moss clothed most of the 

 country, but three out of every four blades, or rather strings, of 

 the first were withered, which gave it a tawny coloration, with 

 only " an eye of green in't " as in Prospero's island. Here and 

 there, however, were some really green stretches of true turf, 

 along the banks or in the bend of some rivulet, reminding one 

 of common-land in England. Generally speaking, it was flat, 

 sometimes rolling, not often steep except when one plunged 

 down into watercourses ; but out of this general flatness there 

 rose, all about, great stony hills or hid-mountains, that reared 

 themselves suddenly up, and had usually the most salient and, as 

 one may say, violent shapes. Some, that we passed quite close 

 under, were nothing but enormous heaps of shattered fragments 

 of the basic material — lava, namely — reduced wholly to this 

 condition, and so like mere stone-heaps, made by man, that 

 one almost accepted them as such, and wondered at their size ; 



