The Iceland year-book - 01.01.1926, Side 24

same fjord, turning toward the capital its great
motley-coloured bluffs, stands Esja, an unending
delight to the eye. Near the northernmost Jokulsa
rises the ponderous-looking HerSubreiS (the
„broadshouldered“), dark-blue of hue and steeply-
sided, surmounted by its double glaciers, which,
under the sheen of the sun, become alternately
masses of frosted and masses of polished silver;
and in the same quarter is the still higher Snaefell
(5.800 feet) — not to be confounded with the
western Snsefellsnessjokull — on which the light
seems always fondly to linger, as its far-seen
summit looks down upon the long, broad, plea-
sant Fljostdalur, 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 fearsome eruption of 1875, which
enwrapped all Eastern Iceland in dense darkness,
and carpeted an immense tract
A Stupendous with a stifling bed of pumice;
Crater. 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 ex-
tensive, 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 altitude than any
of these is the long-dormant volcano Krafla, ele-
vating itself not far away from the islanded lake
of Myvatn, out of which poured in 1729 that re-
18