But To Return To The "Foam." After Passing The Cape, Away
We Went Across The Spacious Brieda Fiord, At The
Rate of
nine or ten knots an hour, reeling and bounding at the
heels of the steamer, which seemed scarcely
To feel how
uneven was the surface across which we were speeding.
Down dropped Snaefell beneath the sea, and dim before
us, clad in evening haze, rose the shadowy steeps of
Bardestrand. The north-west division of Iceland consists
of one huge peninsula, spread out upon the sea like a
human hand, the fingers just reaching over the Arctic
circle; while up between them run the gloomy fiords,
sometimes to the length of twenty, thirty, and even forty
miles. Anything more grand and mysterious than the
appearance of their solemn portals, as we passed across
from bluff to bluff, it is impossible to conceive. Each
might have served as a separate entrance to some poet's
hell - so drear and fatal seemed the vista one's eye just
caught receding between the endless ranks of precipice
and pyramid.
There is something, moreover, particularly mystical in
the effect of the grey, dreamy atmosphere of an arctic
night, through whose uncertain medium mountain and headland
loom as impalpable as the frontiers of a demon world,
and as I kept gazing at the glimmering peaks, and monstrous
crags, and shattered stratifications, heaped up along
the coast in cyclopean disorder, I understood how natural
it was that the Scandinavian mythology, of whose mysteries
the Icelanders were ever the natural guardians and
interpreters, should have assumed that broad, massive
simplicity which is its most beautiful characteristic.
Amid the rugged features of such a country the refinements
of Paganism would have been dwarfed into insignificance.
How out of place would seem a Jove with his beard in
ringlets - a trim Apollo - a sleek Bacchus - an ambrosial
Venus - a slim Diana, and all their attendant groups of
Oreads and Cupids - amid the ocean mists, and icebound
torrents, the flame-scarred mountains, and four months'
night - of a land which the opposing forces of heat and
cold have selected for a battle-field!
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 125 of 286
Words from 34926 to 35278
of 79667
