The Iceland year-book - 01.01.1926, Qupperneq 39

greatly enhanced revenues, has energetically set
about the building of carriage-roads, and has al-
ready completed long stretches, it will be many
years before the island possesses any such extended
system of highways as is to be found
Physical elsewhere. The man of torpid liver, or
exercise, of sluggish blood, will thus generally
be compelled to take his airings, and
make his excursions, on the Icelandic pony, one
of the most intelligent, easy-seated and sure-footed
of animals; it would be difficult to desire a
pleasanter and, at the same time, more effective
kind of bodily exercise... It is
The environment hardly necessary to refer to
a mental and the influence upon the mind,
physical tonic. and through that upon the
body, which the novel world
the foreign visitor enters when he sets his foot
upon the shores of Iceland, inevitably produces
upon the brain-tired intellectual labourer. Here he
finds something fresh —■ vastly different from the
always same and more or less wearisome hotel and
casino life, which he lives through in the rest of
Europe. Here are mountains unlike the mountains
he knows, plains and valleys and lakes and glaciers
and fountains and cascades such as he has never
seen, surroundings which have not the tameness
of familiarity; a past which is strange to him, and
a present abounding in novelty. Such a change of
environment as this refreshes the mind as it heals
the body.