76 



THE POLAR WORLD. 



"Five or six miles beyond the Hrafnagja, near the summit of a dividing 

 ridge, we came upon a very singular volcanic formation, called the Tintron. 

 It stands, a little to the right of the trail, on a rise of scoria and burnt earth, 

 from which it juts up in rugged relief to the height of twenty or thirty feet. 

 This is, strictly speaking, a huge clinker, not unlike what comes out of a grate 

 — hard, glassy in spots, and scraggy all over. The top part is shaped like a 

 shell ; in the centre is a hole about three feet in diameter, which opens into a 

 vast subterranean cavity of unknown depth. Whether the Tintron is an ex- 

 tinct crater, through which fires shot out of the earth in by-gone times, or an 

 isolated mass of lava, whirled through the air out of some distant volcano, is 

 a question that geologists must determine. The probability is that it is one 

 of those natural curiosities so common in Iceland which defy research. The 

 whole country is full of anomalies — bogs where one would expect to find dry 

 land, and parched deserts where it would not seem strange to see bogs ; fire 

 where water ought to be, and water in the place of fire." 



" Ages ago," says Lord Dufferin, " some vast commotion shook the foun- 

 dations of the island ; and bubbling up from sources far away amid the inland 

 hills, a fierj deluge must have rushed down between their ridges, until, esca- 

 ping from the narrower gorges, it found space to spread itself into one broad 

 sheet of molten stone over an entire district of country, reducing its varied 

 surface to one vast blackened level. One of two things then occurred : either, 



the vitrified mass contracting as it 

 cooled, the centre area of fifty square 

 miles (the present plain of Thingvalla) 

 burst asunder at either side from the 

 adjoining plateau, and sinking down to 

 its present level, left two parallel gjas, 

 or chasms, which form its lateral bound- 

 aries, to mark the limits of the disruption ; or else, while the pith or marrow of 

 the lava was still in a fluid state, its upper surface became solid, and formed a 



FALL OF THE OXERAA. 



