Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Síða 75

NOTES ON ICELANDIC MATTERS 65
pools of puffing and gas-emitting clay. Other sulphur sources
are found nearer Husavik. — Iceland no longer has a monopoly
of gigantic spouting hot wells, as in the days when the Great
Geysir was reckoned one of the world’s wonders, and hence
gave its Icelandic name to its rivals in New-Zealand and in
the Yellowstone Valley of North America; yet still no land
has such an abundance of these boiling waters, extending over
so large a territory. The fellow of the Great Geysir, the Strokk-
ur, so popular with travellers of many generations, has ceased,
since a recent earthquake, to exhibit its peculiar powers, but
Geysir yet has, in the same plain, more than fifty lesser com-
panions. Far south, near the sea, was, till lately, another spout-
ing well, called the Little Geysir, but it, too, has nearly suspended
its operations, rising only occasionally when Hekla shows some
sign of life. Of other boiling sources the number is infinite,
as the list of places on the map containing the word reykur
(reek, steam) or one of its derivatives, sufficiently evinces. One
western valley, the Reykholtsdalur, is particularly noted for its
many visible columns of steam. In the middle of one of its
streams stands a quaint pile of tufa, raised by the deposits of
a tiny geysir issuing from its top to a height of some feet,
while at other places steam floats up from fissures in the bottom
of the stream. Further up the valley, near the farmstead and
church of Reykholt, the residence and death-place of Snorri
Sturluson, Iceland’s foremost son, there are two considerable
steaming fountains, one of which (Skrifla) still feeds the great
bath, constructed of blocks of hewn stone by the celebrated
sagaman in the thirteenth century. Of the other sites of this
sort, historically noteworthy are the warm baths of Reykjalaug
some miles west of the Althing' plain, and those of Krossberg
north of the same spot, in which the early converts to Christ-
ianity, made such by vote of the Althing, were baptized,
after refusing to go into the very uncomfortable cold water in
order to ratify their adoption of a religion in the tenets of
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