with their perpetual mantles of
snow. Nearer, on the verge of the valley, were the red peaks of the
foot-hills. To the right lay the quiet waters of the lake glistening
in the sunbeams. In front, a great black fissure stretched from the
shores of the lake to the base of the mountains, presenting to the eye
an impassable barrier. This was the famous Hrafnajau--the uncouth and
terrible twin-brother of the Almannajau.

A toilsome ride of eight miles brought us to the edge of the Pass,
which in point of rugged grandeur far surpasses the Almannajau, though
it lacks the extent and symmetry which give the latter such a
remarkable effect. Here was a tremendous gap in the earth, over a
hundred feet deep, hacked and shivered into a thousand fantastic
shapes; the sides a succession of the wildest accidents; the bottom a
chaos of broken lava, all tossed about in the most terrific confusion.
It is not, however, the extraordinary desolation of the scene that
constitutes its principal interest. The resistless power which had
rent the great lava-bed asunder, as if touched with pity at the ruin,
had also flung from the tottering cliffs a causeway across the gap,
which now forms the only means of passing over the great Hrafnajau. No
human hands could have created such a colossal work as this; the
imagination is lost in its massive grandeur; and when we reflect that
miles of an almost impassable country would otherwise have to be
traversed in order to reach the opposite side of the gap, the
conclusion is irresistible that in the battle of the elements Nature
still had a kindly remembrance of man.

[Illustration: THE HRAFNAJAU.]

Five or six miles beyond the Hrafnajau, near the summit of a
dividing ridge, we came upon a very singular volcanic formation called
the Tintron. It stands, a little to the right of the trail, on a rise
of scoria and burned earth, from which it juts up in rugged relief to
the height of twenty or thirty feet. This is, strictly speaking, a
huge clinker not unlike what comes out of a grate--hard, glassy in
spots, and scraggy all over. The top part is shaped like a shell; in
the centre is a hole about three feet in diameter, which opens into a
vast subterranean cavity of unknown depth. Whether the Tintron is an
extinct crater, through which fires shot out of the earth in by-gone
times, or an isolated mass of lava, whirled through the air out of
some distant volcano, is a question that geologists must determine.