THE OXONIAN IN ICELAND.*

Booms about Iceland, like books about Central Africa or Japan, are almost invariably pleasant reading. They stir up in us some of that sense of the romanCe which ought to exist in travel and which is so fast disappearing from the world, to the huge discontent of children and men with imaginations. There is very little left in geography over which the fancy can play, and less still which can excite in us the sensations either of awe or wonder. The pyra- mids are overdone, Pekin is an exploded falsehood, and photo- graphs of the cities of the Desert are selling all over London. It is difficult to find anything new, and when it is found it is sure to be so like everything else, that the only faculty called into play is that of analysis to record the almost imperceptible points of difference. Everybody knows now that there are no cities to be found full of un- changed Aztecs, that the interior of South America has no marvellous wonders to reveal, that the gloomy and awe-striking Siberia is very like Cumberland on a very gigantic scale. The utmost we now expect is to find a race like the Fans, which descends not only below the ordinary habits but the ordinary thoughts of humanity; or a country like Japan, where civilization exists under conditions we are accus- tomed to deem impossible; or an island like Iceland, where nature, in a mood of savage lavishness, has piled up scenes which in their mingled grotesquery and terror call up once more the feelings the "Exile of Siberia" excites in an ordinary child. Perhaps the last in- stance is the most perfect of the three. The accounts of the Japanese excite the reasoning faculty too much, and M. du Chaffin's friends are too disgusting, and Mr. Livingstone's enemies too intelligible, to give us the pleasant pain of feeling awestruck; but Nature is never contemptible, and it is impossible to read of her freaks in Iceland without a dim sense of fear—fear of a power which, kind everywhere else, seems in this one island to be almost malignant. The Northern man who invented the hell of the Eddas piled together all the ideas of cold he could imagine or devise, pathless seas of ice bounded by icy mountains over which the sinner is perpetually driven by the snakes of ice which crawl over his naked soul, and the horrible thought scarcely seems to men of a more genial clime to surpass Ice- landic realities. Mountains of snow are separated by volcanic valleys where hot springs boil up for ever, and life is passed in a slow mono- tony of cold, broken only by tales of the devastation caused by the breaking up of an ice torrent, or the rain produced by an enormous landslip. 'Me feeling, half horror and half curiosity, with which a great savant—could he keep his head—might watch the shocks of an earthquake, is always present to the traveller in Iceland, and it is on the perfect or partial rendering of this feeling that the merit of Ice- landic books depends. Mr. Metcalfe has rendered it fairly well. He does not describe quite enough, giving us sometimes rather the feel- ing produced by the scene than the actual scene itself; but then he does not take all meaning out of his description by calculations of the number of eggs the great Geyser could boil in a minute, or the barometric height of a half-fluid lava plain. For some reason or other, perhaps former travel, he knows his subject a little too well, and makes us feel sometimes as a stranger feels when a Londoner condescends to show him the sights of -London. The details one wants to know are assumed as already known. He is a pleasant companion, nevertheless ; humorous and observant, though with a mind always impressed with those dominant features of the scene which hackneyed guides so invariably miss. Often jocose, and some- times a little trivial, he never loses the sense that nature in Iceland is terrible—that the one true emotion for the traveller is awe, not altogether unmixed with a trace of the physical fear from which he himself was so obviously free. The book, especially in its first chapters, quickens the pulse of the imagination—like Mr. Atkinson's wonderful chapter on the prairie darkened by the shadows of the Altai—and there are so few books which do that, that we'may pass over minor defects. The eject of Icelandic seenekis better conveyed by Mr. Metcalfe than by clearer writers; so well conveyed, that with a little more of the art of the story-teller, or even a little more pains, his book would have lived beyond the life Mr. Mudie gives to a popular story.

The impression of awe commences with the traveller's first sight of Iceland

"Yonder' above the fog-bank which blocks out the lower landscape, rises the highest mountain of the country, Oraefa Rikul, 6241 Danish feet above the sea; its white crown of unsullied snow contrasting startlingly with the grey- shadows of the morning. Underneath it, and close by the shore, but invisible, rise the cliffs of Ingoltslinfdi; famous as the spot where Ingolf the Norwegian landed, when he came to establish himself in the country in the year 874. A little east of this lies Breidamark's Mut, whose glaciers advancing and descend- ing towards the sea have covered up the spot where once dwelt Hrollaug, nephew of Bello, that 'gangrel carle.' Bet see. further to the west is another high mountain, Myrdals lökul, usually as white with ice and snow as its huge adjoin- ing sister Eyafialla Mal. But now its garment of brightness has been torn from * The Oceans in leetaniL By the Bev. F. hiewallo. Longman and Co.

it, and exchanged for a covering of sackcloth and ashes. The cause of this phenomenon is the terrific explosion of KstIngitt, which began in May of this year, and lasted for eight weeks."

Reykjavik, the capital, seems an ordinary place enough, with a dirty hotel, and a rector who has not an idea of what the interior is bke, but the first adventure on the journey, whicli we may re- mark en peasant can only be performed on horseback, recals the true Iceland :

"A rough walk of a few score yards brings us to the justly celebrated Lag- berg (Law-hill), the site for a thousand years of the open air parliament. The religio loci is well calculated to work strongly on the mind of the spectator. But its natural features are such as to make an impression never to be obliterated. Fancy yourself on a tolerably even, grass-grown plateau, on the edge of a plain of dark, rugged, moss-dappled lava; and then fancy that all along the edges of this plateau, which is in the shape of a rude irregular lozenge, yawning grooves open out, perpendicular and very many fathoms deep. And then again, below this, come as many more fathoms of sapphire-tinted water, which has flowed down from the mountains by concealed channels, and again speedily disappears, and escapes by subterranean ducts into the adjoining lake of Tingyalla. "Atone spot, the sides of this giddy cleft contract to within nine ells of each other and over this yawning chasm once sprang for his life, like Morton, in Old Mortality,' over the Black Linn of Linkwater, a criminal named Flosi ! . . . About the centre of the enclosure is the place where the president sat in a booth (the ruins of which were visible forty years ago); and around him, on banks of earth, which are still to be traced, the forty-eight dimmer or doomsmen. A few paces to the north of this is an eminence, from which another functionary recited the old laws and promulgated new ones. Without, were the people of the country crowding round to the edge of the abyss, and barred by it from enter- ing the sacred precincts."

This is scarcely less appalling:

"We now enter upon the Ilraun. It was ruin indeed, the abomination of de- solation; as if the elements of some earlier world had melted with fervent heat. . . . . Quagmires of melted glue—so sticky were they—on the one hand; bristling, bare, wrecks of fractured lava, on the other; the one threatening to engulph man and horse, the other to maim and mutilate us. Then, again, yawning caverns and cracks gluttonous for our mangled remains ; angular barricades—

'The nodding horror of whose shady brows, Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger.'

while, as if in bitter mockery, cairns of stones are piled up at intervals to show the road, which is 'no man's road' at all, whatever a chamois or reindeer might have thought of it. The whole scene around was one to make the flesh creep, and mine crept accordingly, while my teeth or tongue chattered within me saying- ' This is desolation.''

While in the distance the "caldrons," the hot-springs of Hvera- vellir nqsre bubbling visibly. The little dry stream which the horses pick for an easier path, was "vomited forth by Leinmkr, a volcano near this, which, with its neighbour Krable, divides the infamy of turning many a smiling green acre into a frowning horror :"

"The waves of the stupendous torrent (of lava), which we are now crossing, are more deeply channelled than any I have yet seen. An eye-witness of this eruption states, that in the day a blue sulphureons flame hung over thestream. At night it was all of a red glow, dyeing the heavens the same colour. At times, owing to the weariness, mayhap, of the subterranean stokers, the torrent relaxed ; when its surface became coverd with a solidified rind some two feet in thickness. Anon, the Eery tide flowed again, and pressing on the hardening mass, split the epidermis—just as I have seen the waters-flood burst the ice encasing the bosom of the mighty Danube—and the masses of stone were swept along by it, just like the lamps of disrupted ice on the water. Vapour-swollen caverns and deep crevasses yawn around; the latter hedged here and there by vast slabs of dusky lava, of various degrees of thickness—very boiler-plates to look upon ; while black statuesque figures, and morsels of goblin tracery and sculpture, as if from the halls of Eblis, are grouped together in the wildest and most wonderful con- fusion."

Mr. Metcalfe was on his way to the sulphur mountains ; his road lying "over cinder-heaps, and then over black lava saffroned with yellow moss, now starting up into jagged points, now grottoed, or in places mouthing with low-browed arches," up to the sandy plain which "with its gamboge-coloured pustules steams lazily," the whole forming a vast plain of black lava broken with little sandy tracts of this kind:

"We descend on foot to see this great sight, over the leprous crust that caked the flat. A cry from the cavern-mouthed boy is too late to stop me, and in goes my foot through the crust, disclosing a festering hole gaping under my very eyes, from which I am saved by the clutch of my attendants. One cannot be too cau- tions here; to the ignes suppositi the descent is extremely facile. The hot earth is sloughed all about underneath. We approach with cautious tread, half blinded by steam and suffocated by sublimated sulphur, the closely-packed caldrons all boiling with a thick lead-coloured mixture. One of these evidently rises at times several feet; for it has surrounded itself with a blue round slimy breastwork disgusting to look upon. In another of these boilers the pasty soup is so thick and slab, that its attempt to boil is a signal failure, degenerating into a futile sluggish simmer."

There is endless sulphur, of course, which, also of course, a British settler has secured ; but our business just now is not with trade. If there is a plain to cross "it is grooved with deep fissures, a slip into which wciuld be fatal;" and on the ordinary road, every hole is sur- rounded with the razor-like edges of the lava which cut the horses' legs to the bone. These are the dangers of good weather, but in bad seasons the snow comes up in blinding drifts which numb the mind as well as the body, and the rivers are roaring torrents, carrying huge blocks of ice. We wish we had room for a description of Hekla with its three peaks, and mountain-side heaving with volcanic heat, but the following extract must suffice to prove our case :

"The broad river contracts by degrees, and issues from a rugged defile of singular grotesqueness. The torrent has in some places scooped out caves in the trap-rock, faced with skew-arches, which would have done honour to any railway contractor. The rocks seem determined not to be outdone by the doings of the water. If you can roar, I can scowl. If you can cut capers. I can cut faces.' Unsightly shapes were there, glouring among those rifted chasms: Oinnium gatherenn monsters, writhing over the surging abyss ; sheaves of basaltiform trap, some butt-end towards the water ; some inclined ; some perpendicular, or gathering to a point like fan-tracery. The cause of all this chaos is, that the water-sprite, or the river if you will, has been bridled by a curb of stone; which provokes him into leaping bodily into a circular pool, over which two Trolls keep watch and ward.

"In the centre of the semicircular barrier is a grassy rock. On its right, one vast stream makes a swoop clean over a dimly seen cavern ; while, on its left, the water is scattered in a continuous chain of beautiful perpendicular falls. One of these, as if impatient of control, and averse to waiting for its turn, has actually tunnelled for itself a slantindicular passage from the upper river bed, and through the dam, from a hole in the face of which it bursts forth instead of over it; and two other bodies of water, resolved by hook or by crook not to be left behind in the race, have mined a short cut deeper still, and are seen leaping out in furious frolic by posterns still lower down the wall:—' postica falle clientem'—a weird scene ; rendered perhaps more supernatural by the absence of all trees to soften and veil its ghastly features: add to which, the mountains in front, in reality of no great height, look dimly huge, quite sky high, through the fog, which has suddenly enwreathed them, rolling up from the northern sea."

There is much in the book besides these descriptions ; little sketches of the people and their ways, lists of prices and means of travelling, with endless legends, most of them well worth telling. To anybody who wants to travel in Iceland, Mr. Metcalfe gives plenty of information, but the merit of the book is in the sort of paragraph we have quoted, in a ground tone of horror which is not produced by any artifice of fine writing, and which the author seemingly would gladly keep down if he could. Nature is too strong for him, and it is because nature has mastered a light spirit and fluent pen that we recommend the Oxonian in Iceland.

The illustrations to this book are as bad as it is possible for illustra- tions to be.