SKALHOLT. 
159 
dish of boiled salmon, eaten with butter and 
vinegar, and, after it, a mess of mutton, boiled 
to fags, mixed with melted butter, and eaten 
with a sweet sauce of oatmeal and sugar. During 
this repast, the persons, who were sent for the 
preceding evening to be my guides to Hecla, 
arrived with the unwelcome intelligence, that, 
in the present state of the weather and morasses, 
they neither could nor would undertake to con¬ 
duct me to that place. The rivers, too, were 
so swollen, that those, which at other times were 
said to be deep, were not now to be crossed with¬ 
out extreme danger. My Reikevig guide, also, 
declared he would not proceed with me, but 
await my return at Skalholt. It was in vain 
contending with the obstinacy and superstitious 
timidity of these men; for, though, owing to the 
excessive wetness of the season, there would, 
undoubtedly, have been some difficulty in wading 
through the morasses, yet their apprehensions 
principally arose from the necessity there would 
have been for them to climb a volcanic moun¬ 
tain, * which many of them believe to be the 
abode of the damned, and which all the lower 
* This opinion is well known to have existed of old in hea¬ 
then superstition; following which the classical poets make 
iEtna the prison of the giants: Gasper Peucer, as quoted by 
Arngrimus Jonass states the matter, respecting Hecla, very 
circumstantially:—Est in Islandia, inquit, mons Hecla, qui 
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