up of coffee and a
dry biscuit put me in traveling order, and we were soon on our way up
the valley.

For the first few miles we followed the range of the "Jau," from which
we then diverged across the great lava-beds of Thingvalla. It was not
long before we struck into a region of such blasted and barren aspect
that the imagination was bewildered with the dreary desolation of the
scene. The whole country, as far as the eye could reach, was torn up
and rent to pieces. Great masses of lava seemed to have been wrested
forcibly from the original bed, and hurled at random over the face of
the country. Prodigious fissures opened on every side, and for miles
the trail wound through a maze of sharp points and brittle crusts of
lava, with no indication of the course save at occasional intervals a
pile of stones on some prominent point, erected by the peasants as a
way-mark for travelers. Sometimes our hardy little horses climbed like
goats up the rugged sides of a slope, where it seemed utterly
impossible to find a foothold, so tortured and chaotic was the face of
the earth; and not unfrequently we became involved in a labyrinth of
fearful sinks, where the upper stratum had given way and fallen into
the yawning depths below. Between these terrible traps the trail was
often not over a few feet wide. It was no pleasant thing to
contemplate the results of a probable slip or a misstep. The whole
country bore the aspect of baffled rage--as if imbued with a demoniac
spirit, it had received a crushing stroke from the Almighty hand that
blasted and shivered it to fragments.

[Illustration: LAVA-FJELDS.]

There were masses that looked as if they had turned cold while running
in a fiery flood from the crater--wavy, serrated, frothy, like tar
congealed or stiffened on a flat surface. One piece that I sketched
was of the shape of a large leaf, upon which all the fibres were
marked. It measured ten feet by four. Another bore a resemblance to a
great conch-shell. Many were impressed with the roots of shrubs and
the images of various surrounding objects--snail-shells, pebbles,
twigs, and the like. On a larger scale, bubbling brooks, waterfalls,
and whirlpools were represented--now no longer a burning flood, but
stiff, stark, and motionless. One sketch, which is reproduced, bore a
startling resemblance to some of the marble effigies on the tombs of
medieval knights.

[Illustration: EFFIGY IN LAVA.]

The distant mountains were covered