Yet It Is From The Bosom Of This
Desert District That Has Descended The Most Frightful
Visitation Ever Known To Have Desolated The Island.
This event occurred in the year 1783.
The preceding winter
and spring had been unusually mild. Toward the end of
May, a light bluish fog began to float along the confines
of the untrodden tracts of Skapta, accompanied in the
beginning of June by a great trembling of the earth. On
the 8th of that month, immense pillars of smoke collected
over the hill country towards the north, and coming down
against the wind in a southerly direction, enveloped the
whole district of Sida in darkness. A whirlwind of ashes
then swept over the face of the country, and on the 10th,
innumerable fire spouts were seen leaping and flaring
amid the icy hollows of the mountain, while the river
Skapta, one of the largest in the island, having first
rolled down to the plain a vast volume of fetid waters
mixed with sand, suddenly disappeared.
Two days afterwards a stream of lava, issuing from sources
to which no one has ever been able to penetrate, came
sliding down the bed of the dried-up river, and in a
little time, - though the channel was six hundred feet
deep and two hundred broad, - the glowing deluge overflowed
its banks, crossed the low country of Medalland, ripping
the turf up before it like a table-cloth, and poured into
a great lake whose affrighted waters flew hissing and
screaming into the air at the approach of the fiery
intruder.
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