Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/298

292 fog which later became confounded with, and imperfectly dissipated by, torrents of rain. It was a disappointing reception, and all the more vexatious because at Faskrudsfiord, the first stopping-place, occasional raisings of the curtain gave spectral glimpses of vast snowy peaks accumulated in unseen grandeur behind the rolling folds of the mist. It was in a measure a compensation for their obscuration that plentiful showers seamed the steep canon walls of the inlet with plunging silver cataracts. These developed with instantaneous rapidity, leaping down over the basaltic cliffs in innumerable threads.

A word descriptive of the physical configuration of Iceland will make more clear the outline and incidents of the trip about the island. Iceland has in general a subelliptical shape with its longer axis lying northeast and southwest. This approximate form is extended into a sort of lateral excrescence or finger-formed expansion at the northwest margin, in a deeply dissected peninsula, which lies between the Breitfiord and the bay of Hunafloi (see map).

The island is fringed on its eastern, northern and western shores by a continuous succession of inlets, bays, fiord-like arms, which often subdivide and branch at their heads into smaller crevices and communicate with lowlands or valleys leading back into the hills and the interior. The southern shore offers a considerable contrast to this fimbriation of its other coasts, and while it is assumed by Thoroddsen that the southern shore was at one time indented by similar inlets, to-day it presents an entire outline which represents broad margins of sand, flows of mud and detrital deposits, scored by glacial streams, and punctuated by lakes or lagoons, in other words, a fiorded area blocked and filled up by later blankets, and upthrown banks and plugs of sand from the sea, or by the fluviatile washings from the higher country, and the past deluges of sediments from the melting glaciers.

The trip about the island is made up of entrances into these fiords, and of skirting the coast, which presents a series of superb pictures, while the occasional stops permit transient glimpses of the life and industry of the people. Our company, on the staunch little craft Vesta, conducted on its devious ways by the bluff and able seaman, Captain Braun, was one of diversified elements and entertaining contrasts. A little group of French wanderers (among them, the daughter of the great student of hypnotism, Dr. Charcot, and Professor Gourdon, geologist of the French Antarctic Expedition) imparted a continental elegance to our homely equipage, the Englishmen and one most amiable and companionable Scotchman, furnished the necessary insular sobriety and steadiness, a versatile and courteous German trader aided us at all points with explanations and directions, two English ladies revealed unexpected liveliness and powers of amusing