The Iceland year-book - 01.01.1926, Síða 28

OdaSahraun (the „desert of evil
The Great deeds") —■ once peopled, in the
Deserts. popular imagination, by desperate
outlaws; the long, grassless Sprengi-
sandur, between the Arnarfell and Tungnafells-
jokull, haunted, as he who traverses it finds out, by
the pursuing spirits of dreariness and solitude,
and which has hence produced one of the most
stirrings poems of the nineteenth century:
RiSum, riSum og rekum yfir sandinn,
rennur sol a bakviS Arnarfell; ,
the myriad of glaciers, both stationary and flow-
ing (creeping glaciers), generally differing in char-
acter from the icy formation of more southern
lands, both waging endless warfare against the
genial forces of the sun, and producing a strange
phenomenon, peculiar to Iceland, styled an ,,ice-
leap", caused by the welling up of water, which de-
taches great fragmentary portions of the glacier
and then hears them down to the lowlands; the
many gigantic glacier-borne boulders, known as
Grettistok (,,Grettir grips" or ,,Grettir takes"),
since they were hurled, according to the lore of the
folk, by the invincible national hero against his
pursuing foes; and, lastly, in a large sense, the 750
square miles occupied by the icy tract of the
Vatnajokull in the South-east, the interior of which
is still partially unexplored.
One may see from the preceding pages, faint
and imperfect as such a sketch is, that the Alpinist
and the student of mountainous nature can find few
finer fields for his observation and study than the
island of Iceland.
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