Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/308

302 palisades, of broad embrasures and galleries, dug out by weathering agencies, with the clear aqua-marine waters rolling languidly over jagged barriers of basalt. Vopnafiord seemed flat. It was our next stopping place. The French ladies declared it looked like Brittany and perhaps it did. They ought to know. It was a low shore, rocky, with green uplands and farms, and many threatening reefs. On again in fog with a coast intermittently seen to the left, and at night we passed into the arctic circle, and, as the day dawned over the magic sea, the air became brilliantly clear, the sky serene and cloudless, the waves docile and appeased.

We were far away from the shore. It was the northern edge of Nord Thingeyar Sysla with remote lines of elevation and long horizontal lines like some topographic section. We crossed the broad Axarfiord, on a sea blazing with light, and approached the islands of Minareyjar dancing in mirage, and soon passed Red Hook, carmine with iron secretions oozing from its jointed rocks, and along an old raised beach with enormous moorlands behind it, which a sporting vice-admiral of England declared were full of patridge (ryper), and which had a most inviting wild remote loneliness expressed in them.