Fortune, However, Seemed Determined That Of These
Bitternesses We Should Not Taste; For The Next Morning,
Bright And Joyous Overhead Bent The Blue Unclouded Heaven;
While The Plain Lay Gleaming At Our Feet In All The
Brilliancy Of Enamel.
I was sorely tempted to linger
another day in the neighbourhood; but we have already
spent more time upon
The Geysirs than I had counted upon,
and it will not do to remain in Iceland longer than the
15th, or Winter will have begun to barricade the passes
into his Arctic dominions. My plan, on returning to
Reykjavik, is to send the schooner round to wait for us
in a harbour on the north coast of the island, while we
ourselves strike straight across the interior on horseback.
The scenery, I am told, is magnificent. On the way we
shall pass many a little nook, shut up among the hills,
that has been consecrated by some touching old-world
story; and the manner of life among the northern inhabitants
is, I believe, more unchanged and characteristic than
that of any other of the islanders. Moreover, scarcely
any stranger has ever penetrated to any distance in this
direction; and we shall have an opportunity of traversing
a slice of that tremendous desert - piled up for thirty
thousand square miles in disordered pyramids of ice and
lava over the centre of the country, and periodically
devastated by deluges of molten stone and boiling mud,
or overwhelmed with whirlwinds of intermingled snow and
cinders, - an unfinished corner of the universe, where
the elements of chaos are still allowed to rage with
unbridled fury.
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