I Should Have Felt Tolerably Comfortable In My Present Quarters,
Accustomed As I Am To Bear Privations Of All Kinds With
Indifference, If They Would But Have Left Me In Peace.
But the
reader may fancy my horror when the whole population, not only of
the cottage itself, but also
Of the neighbouring dwellings, made
their appearance, and, planting themselves partly in my chamber and
partly at the door, held me in a far closer state of siege than even
at Krisuvik. I was, it appeared, quite a novel phenomenon in the
eyes of these good people, and so they came one and all and stared
at me; the women and children were, in particular, most unpleasantly
familiar; they felt my dress, and the little ones laid their dirty
little countenances in my lap. Added to this, the confined
atmosphere from the number of persons present, their lamentable want
of cleanliness, and their filthy habit of spitting, &c., all
combined to form a most dreadful whole. 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.
But let us turn from this picture. I would rather tell of the
angel's face I saw in Kalmannstunga. It was a girl, ten or twelve
years of age, beautiful and lovely beyond description, so that I
wished I had been a painter. How gladly would I have taken home
with me to my own land, if only on canvass, the delicate face, with
its roguish dimples and speaking eyes! But perhaps it is better as
it is; the picture might by some unlucky chance have fallen into the
hands of some too-susceptible youth, who, like Don Sylvio de
Rosalva, in Wieland's Comical Romance, would immediately have
proceeded to travel through half the world to find the original of
this enchanting portrait.
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