LAYA. 
37 
of the country. Our plan at present, after visiting the 
hot springs, is to return to Reykjavik, and stretch right 
across the middle of the island to the north coast,— 
scarcely ever visited by strangers. Thence we shall 
sail straight away to Jan Mayen. 
In pursuance of this arrangement, the first thing 
to do was to buy some horses. Away, accordingly, 
we went in the gig to the little pier leading up to 
the merchant’s house who had kindly promised Sigurdr 
to provide them. Everything in the country that is 
not made of wood is made of lava. The pier was con- 
structed out of huge boulders of lava, the shingle is 
lava, the sea-sand is pounded lava, the mud on the 
roads is lava paste, the foundations of the houses are 
lava blocks, and in dry weather you are blinded with 
lava dust. Immediately upon landing I was presented 
to a fine, burly gentleman, who, I was informed, could 
let me have a steppe-ful of horses if I desired, and a 
few minutes afterwards I picked myself up in the 
middle of a Latin oration on the subject of the weather. 
Having suddenly lost my nominative case, I concluded 
abruptly with the figure syncope, and a bow, to which 
my interlocutor politely replied “ Ita.” Many of the 
