During These Visits I Did
More Penance Than By The Longest Fasts; And Fasting, Too, Was An
Exercise I Seldom
Escaped, as I could touch few Icelandic dishes.
The cookery of the Icelandic peasants is wholly confined to the
preparation
Of dried fish, with which they eat fermented milk that
has often been kept for months; on very rare occasions they have a
preparation of barley-meal, which is eaten with flat bread baked
from Icelandic moss ground fine.
I could not but wonder at the fact that most of these people
expected to find me acquainted with a number of things generally
studied only by men; they seemed to have a notion that in foreign
parts women should be as learned as men. So, for instance, the
priests always inquired if I spoke Latin, and seemed much surprised
on finding that I was unacquainted with the language. The common
people requested my advice as to the mode of treating divers
complaints; and once, in the course of one of my solitary wanderings
about Reikjavik, on my entering a cottage, they brought before me a
being whom I should scarcely have recognised as belonging to the
same species as myself, so fearfully was he disfigured by the
eruption called "lepra." Not only the face, but the whole body also
was covered with it; the patient was quite emaciated, and some parts
of his body were covered with sores. For a surgeon this might have
been an interesting sight, but I turned away in disgust.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 141 of 329
Words from 37622 to 37875
of 87606