of the fiord, and saw the people of
Iceland for the first time. They were a little colony cut off by
impassable mountains from their fellows within the island, and having
no ships in which they dare venture to their kind on the seas
without; tall and strong-limbed in their persons, commonly of yellow
hair, but sometimes of red, of which neither sex was ashamed; living
on bread that was scarce eatable, being made of fish that had been
dried and powdered; lazy and unclean; squalid and mean-spirited, and
with the appearance of being depressed and kept under. It was a
cheerless life they lived at the feet of the great ice-bound jokull
and the margin of the frozen sea, so that looking around on the
desolate place and the dumb wilderness of things before and behind,
Adam asked himself why and how any living souls had ever ventured
there.

But for all that the little colony were poor and wretched, the hearts
of the shipwrecked company leapt up at sight of them, and in the
joyful gabble of unintelligible speech between them old Adam found
that he could understand some of the words. And when the islanders
saw that in some sort Adam understood them they singled him out from
the rest of his company, falling on his neck and kissing him after
the way of their nation, and concluding among themselves that he was
one of their own people who had gone away in his youth and never been
heard of after. And Adam, though he looked shy at their musty kisses,
was nothing loth to allow that they might be Manxmen strayed and
lost.

For Adam and his followers two things came of this encounter, and the
one was to forward and the other to retard their journey. The first
was that the islanders sold them twelve ponies, of the small breed
that abound in that latitude, and gave them a guide to lead them the
nearest way to the capital. The ponies cost them forty kroner, or
more than two pounds apiece, and the guide was to stand to them in
two kroner, or two shillings, a day. This took half of all they had
in money, and many were the heavy groans of the men at parting with
it; but Adam argued that their money was of no other value there than
as a help out of their extremity, and that all the gold in the banks,
if he had it, would be less to him then than the little beast he was
bestriding.

The second of the two things that followed on that meeting with the
islanders was that, just as they had started afresh on their way, now
twelve in all, each man