98 
FIRST ASCENT OF THE OR.ZEFA JOKULL. 
May, 1892. 
excellence ), was totally impassable, and so was the great cake 
of ice from under which it issued, and which I had crossed 
with comparative ease before. This year, however, the warm 
sunshine, which made our days so bright, had proved an 
enemy, in that the lower ice was no longer safe. Hour after 
hour we worked our way up the glacier, turning and twisting 
among the myriad black-sand-covered ice cones, or coaxing 
our ponies up the frozen waves of the Jokull’s surface, until 
we found a place where we could cross the ice ridge of the 
medial moraine, at a point 800 feet above sea level. It was 
3 a.m. on the 15th when we reached Kvisker, and mid¬ 
night before we arrived at Sandfell, my old head-quarters on 
the west. 
Welcome, indeed, was the Sabbath rest. I rode quietly 
down to church at Hof, with my old friend the pastor, and 
as we returned a farmer came with us, who, with the 
pastor, pointed out a great mass of black rock rearing its 
snow-capped head above the snow-fields, and announced that 
that was the “ Knappr.” In 1341, the plain to our left was 
rich and productive, forty fertile farms gathered round the 
little church at Sandfell, and flocks and herds browsed on 
the level meadow land. Suddenly the dormant volcano 
woke, the snow-fields liquefied, and farms and flocks were 
swept into the sea, to help to make the sand banks, 180 
feet thick, which now lie where Atlantic waves had rolled 
before. Sira Magnusson’s house and the little church alone 
remain. 
Hekla is better known, on account of its greater accessi¬ 
bility and the frequency of its eruptions, which have occurred 
on an average once in each generation for the last eight 
centuries; but here, entrenched behind the triple lines of 
desert sand and glacier ice, and Jokulsa, a hundred miles 
from any decent port, lies the true Icelandic mountain king. 
Near Hof a curious result of one of the waterfloods 
may be seen. A vast pile of stones has been swept down, 
and then whirled into a huge circular embankment enclosing 
a funnel-shaped basin thirty feet in diameter. 
At 2 30 on Monday morning my three friends from 
Svinafell appeared, Pall Jonsson, Thorlakur Tliorlaksson, 
and Jon Sigurasson, all eager for another attempt. 
At 4 a.m. we left, after the inevitable stirrup-cup of delicious 
coffee. The barometer stood at 29-8. I had determined 
this time to keep to the rocks as long as possible, and, there¬ 
fore, after crossing the grass lands of the parsonage and its 
little Forget-me-not lined stream, in a north-easterly direction, 
we turned up the slopes of the Hill Sandfell, from which the 
