CHAPTER VI. RIDE TO T1IE geysers: first day. A ride to the Geysers! Not one reader in a thousand can have the faintest idea of what it means and implies. Re it known that the particular group of hot springs known as the Geysers, is fully seventy English miles from Reikiavik. The journey can he performed on horseback in two days, and the same time is required for returning—the intermediate stopping-place being Thingvalla, thirty miles from Reikiavik. There are no roads in Iceland, nothing but rough tracks; there are no inns, nor any accom- modation that can be depended upon in private houses. With ponies to carry yourself, your provisions, tent, and bedding, you adventure into what is virtually a wilderness, like the member of an exploratory-party in Caffreland or Australia. You bid adieu for the time to civilisation, to all its refinements and comforts, trusting, in the sight of extraordinary natural objects, to find a compensation for all the hardships you are to encounter. If the weather he of a broken character, as it was now, and is apt to be before the middle of July, then the discomforts of the adventure are likely to be not a little enhanced. I had difficulties of my own to think of. Having been a rider hitherto on only a few rare occasions, and having reached a time of life when the body has lost much of the elasticity on which successful riding depends—remembering how racked and battered I had been by a Highland pony last year in Glen Tilt, I hardly knew how I was to get through this long rough ride. The only thing per contra was a hardy resolve to do my best, and not give in for light cause. All the day before our start, I looked anxiously at each group of ponies we met on the street, and they were not a few, for this was the time when the country people come to dispose of their wool to the Reikiavik merchants, and take back

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