The Iceland year-book - 01.01.1926, Blaðsíða 25

verent torrent of molten matter which, arriving at
the churchyard of ReykjahliS, divided 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, margined, in the proper sea-
son, by patches of blue-eyed forget-me-nots, grow-
ing 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
An obsidian glistening Hrafntinnuhryggur, a
mountain. 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 industrious Sicilian
artisan fabricates so many pretty and prized orna-
ments. Very singular, as it lingers in
Natural the memory, is the huge Eldborg,
Fortresses, 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 dang-
erous strength. Another minor, hut still formid-
able-looking specimen of the numerous class of
castle-like elevations is the Stora-Borg (or Borg-
arvirki) in the ViSidalur, bearing aloft its high
encircling ramparts of thick-set basalt columns, out
of which a historical tradition will have it that,
just after the tenth century of our era had passed
away, a hero of the saga epoch made a real
fortress, and long and stoutly defended it. But
there is left here only room enough to catalogue,
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