Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/433

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post-office—to which our steamer had brought the letters—the outer world regularly reaches their doors.

I looked into the modest little church through its windows and discovered the altar with candles and a figure of the Christ. The religion of the island is Lutheran. The graves were marked in many instances by polished granite tombstones, many with Thorwaldsen's "Night," in a white medallion of porcelain, upon them, and all more or less covered with tin flowers and tin palms with linen flowers, in white, and many withered wreaths of bear-berries.

After breakfast I climbed up into the amphitheater on the palisades to the east, which in the shadows of the morning seemed remote and fascinating, with a great boulder of liparite flung upon its extremest lip like a propylon at the entrance of a temple. The views from this cup of erosion with its steep talus-slopes of comminuted stone—splinters and angular chips dislodged by frost, were superb—the outer fiord with its snow mountains with the water at their feet dyed bleu foncée, and the hill country southward with snow banks and threading