Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Blaðsíða 72

62 NOTES ON ICELANDIC MATTERS
long, broad, pleasant Fljotsdalur, one of the glories of the
east; and a little more inland is the destructive, many-cratered
Askja, holding in its bosom its strangely swelling tepid lake,
thinly separated from still actively fuming fires — a part of the
mighty Dyngjufjoll group, in the midst of that dreaded and
dreary lava desert, the OdaSahraun; from Askja came the fear-
some eruption of 1875, which enwrapped all Eastern Iceland
in dense darkness, and carpeted an immense tract with a stifl-
ing bed of pumice; Askja consists of a great crater, margined
by many small ones, the great one ranking for size among the
most stupendous of this class of phenomena — so extensive, as
one visitor says of it, that a city of half a million inhabitants
might easily find room in the awful cavity. Far lower in alti-
tude than any of these is the long-dormant volcano, Krafla,
elevating itself not far away from the islanded lake of Myvatn,
out of which poured in 1729 that reverent torrent of molten
matter, which, arriving at the churchyard of ReykjahllS, divi-
ded into two streams and flowed, in either direction, around
the sacred edifice, lest it should desecrate so holy a place. The
visitor rides up Krafla’s slopes along an easy horse-path, mar-
gined, in the proper season, by patches of blue-eyed forget-
me-nots, growing ever tinier as the ascent continues, to gaze
finally from its peak on a long chain of loftier ice-decked
summits bounding the distant horizon. Close beside its base
swells up the glistening Hrafntinnuhryggur, a solid mountain-
height, embedding massive fragments of obsidian, that smooth
and shining semi-precious rocky material — found elsewhere,
too, in the island — from which the deftly-fingered and indus
trious Sicilian artisan fabricates so many pretty and prized
ornaments. Very singular, as it lingers in the memory, is the
huge Eldborg, another long-inactive fire-mountain, seeming, from
nearly every point of the compass, a stupendous fortress of the
old giants, now shorn, like them, of its once dangerous strength.
Another minor, but still formidable looking specimen ot the