74 



THE POLAR WORLD. 



enormous Almannagja, or AUman's Rift, suddenly gapes beneath his feet — a 

 colossal rent extending above a mile in length, and inclosed on both sides by 

 abrupt walls of black lava, frequently upward of a hundred feet high, and sep- 

 arated from about fifty to seventy feet from each other. 



THE ALMANNAGJA. 



A corresponding chasm, but of inferior dimensions, the Hrafnagja, or Ra- 

 ven's Rift, opens its black rampart to the east, about eight miles farther on ; 

 and both form the boundaries of the verdant plain of Thingvalla, which by a 

 grand convulsion of nature has itself been shattered into innumerable small 

 parallel crevices and fissures fifty or sixty feet deep. 



Of the Hrafnagja Mr. Ross Browne says : " A toilsome ride of eight miles 

 brought us to the edge of the Pass, which in point of rugged grandeur far 

 surpasses the Almannagja, though it lacks the extent and symmetry which give 

 the latter such a remarkable effect. Here was a tremendous gap in the earth, 

 over a hundred feet deep, hacked and shivered into a thousand fantastic shapes ; 

 the sides a succession of the wildest accidents ; the bottom a chaos of broken 

 lava, all tossed about in the most terrific confusion. It is not, however, the ex- 

 traordinary desolation of the scene that constitutes its principal interest. The 

 resistless power which had rent the great lava-bed asunder, as if touched with 

 pity at the ruin, had also flung from the tottering cliffs a causeway across the 

 gap, which now forms the only means of passing over the great Hrafnagja. 

 No human hands could have created such a colossal work as this ; the imagi- 

 nation is lost in its massive grandeur ; and when we reflect that miles of an 

 almost impassable country would otherwise have to be traversed in order to 



