ORNITHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION IN ICELAND. 421 



it seemed as if some giant had sat breaking stones on the high- 

 way, if highway there had been, but in others there frowned, 

 above this chaos, the most awful black precipices, in whose 

 scarred face was still to be traced that basaltic or columnar 

 structure, due to the cooling of lava-streams, of which Fingal's 

 Cave, in the Hebrides, and the Giants' Causeway, in Ireland, are 

 the most perfect, or, at least, the most familiar examples. 



As the prospect opened, mountains and chains of mountains 

 rose gigantic on one another, their summits showing every 

 variety of the steep, abrupt and irregular, varied, sometimes, by 

 flat, round or conical, and their hues, except where snow lay on 

 them, like those of night's kingdom. Some had their tops, as 

 well as a considerable portion of their height, completely covered, 

 amongst these being Hecla, whose great mass reared itself 

 hugely and whitely above others near it, but in rounded pro- 

 portions, without peak or pinnacle. Further off, but in the 

 same line of elevation, another great snow-mountain, that rose 

 with smoother sweeps, had its summit — higher even than that 

 of Hecla — crowned with two almost perfectly conical Fusiyama- 

 like peaks, one a good deal larger than the other, but both 

 looking small against the great mass that they stood on. Both 

 peaks, I suppose, are volcanoes, or rather the whole mountain 

 is, and these are the funnels through which it may, at any time, 

 break out into eruption, though, unlike many others, it has not, 

 I believe, done so within the memory of man. We rode all day 

 under the forehead of Hecla and of this other great mountain, 

 and, towards evening, came to, or, rather, from precipitous 

 heights, looked down upon a river, so gloomy, and flowing 

 amidst such tremendous scenery that it might have been Styx 

 itself. Black, beetling precipices rose almost sheer from its 

 waters, but these were but the lower flanks of the mountain 

 gorge that they flowed through, which, yawning upwards, and 

 widening to the sky, towered far above them in a second line of 

 escarpment, on the summits of which we now stood — we had 

 been mounting gradually for a considerable time. This was 

 scenery which stirred the blood and made the pulse of life beat 

 quicker — dark, wild, mysterious, suggestive, stupendous in all 

 its features, like a Salvator Rosa landscape or Dore's illustra- 

 tions to Dante or Don Quixote. Thoughts of some days or a 



