Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/85

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igneous rocks, and with others broken down into broad mounds of flowing stream-like pebbles were wonderfully strange.

Iron oxide was significantly present everywhere, in the water and marshes, and, later, as we crossed peninsulas of outstretched combs from the mountain sides, it glistened as an iridescent film on the mirrors of the mountain streams. Heckla now came gloriously in sight over another arm of the immense plain, beginning in the Thingvallir vatn, and was superbly gleaming in its icy mantles, while removed from it to the south were the Tindfjallajökull and the Eyjaffjallajökull.

The beautiful [sic]Laga vatn spread its mirrory surface below us, imbedded in prairies of meadowland, and all radiant with unchecked sunshine, while along its edges and up its arms rose columns of snow-white steam from its hot springs. Here we stopped for rest at the farmhouse mentioned above, after skirting the mountains by an excellent narrow road winding through a shrubbery of dwarf birch, and huckleberry bushes.

The farm was characteristic. It consisted of five or six structures