Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/431

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wading in the water as indifferently as if he wore Goodyear Rubber Company boots.

More geological themes stared us in the face at Blönduos where a glacial river discharges its mineral burdens into the sea in a turbid muddy tide. Again at Reykiarfiord we were called upon to esteem the endurance of the Icelander. The place is rough and stony, with a few houses and turf-covered cabins, an eider duck island or so, and wore an expression of depressing loneliness, albeit in the bright sunlight it bravely challenged our admiration. Again on our way with our former tireless companion—fog. In the weird night dawn, with the fog dissipated and the north cape passed, we pushed on to Isafjardarjup; and the high shores with dark menacing and austere contours loomed strangely over the fringed spray-scurried waves hissing around us. We plunged headlong into the inky billows until the cape headland gave us shelter, and the confusion about us subsided, and in the morning we woke in Isafiord—a thriving town on a crescentic spit of land enclosing a quiet lake-like harbor in which the Vesta floated.

This fiord was the usual thing; walled in by high cliffs, plainly