The Iceland year-book - 01.01.1926, Side 23

ducing mountain. As volcanoes, jokulls rarely emit
lava, but only showers of ash. Merely a small numb-
er of the multitudinous and multiform mountains
of Iceland can be cited here. The most renowned
of the volcanoes is, of course, Hekla, around which
grewT up in Europe, during the middle ages, a whole
world of myths and superstitious beliefs, somewhat
akin to those which had centered, during classical
pagan times, in Etna and Vesuvius. Hekla is, from
most points of view, hardly worth its world-wide
fame —■ a more or less imposing, but rather rough
and rugged eminence; while the Orsefajokull, the
highest of Iceland’s mountains, 'whether fire-spout-
ing or not (nearly 6.400 feet),and lying in the south-
east — an out-post of the vast glacial domain of
that region — soars, with icy majesty, above its
many companions. To the traveller
The visitor’s approaching from the Faroes,
first sight of Eyjafjallajokull, in the uttermost
Iceland. south, is apt to be his first Ice-
landic vision; he sees before
him not a few cloud-tipped peaks, climbing final-
ly into a noble ice-crowned summit. As, later on,
having left Hekla behind him, he rounds the island’s
southwesternmost point into the waters of the broad
FaxafjorSur, his eyes, looking northward, are fast-
ened upon the Snaefellsjokull, in pre-historic days
a fuming giant, and now resembling, in its outline,
Mediterranean Etna, as one comes sailing from
the Levant to that towering warder of Sicily; a
memorable mount indeed is Snsefellsjokull, even
when seen across the water from Reykjavik sixty
miles away, notably when its dome is set in the
unequalled glories of an Arctic sunset; and on the
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