10 GUIDE TO ICELAND. air is bracing and exhilarating in the extreme; and during the month first named there is virtually no night north of the Shetland Isles. When the tourist lands, all is new and strange and in- teresting ; and once away from Reykjavik all conventionality is left behind, and a fortnight’s glorious Arab-life is before him : and what an indescribable charm there is in the nomad-existence one leads in Iceland! Mounted upon a sure-footed and good- tempered pony, that a child might ride without fear of mishap, one passes almost daily through scenery wild and weird in the extreme; one hour skirting a tranquil lake or a fjord engirdled with lofty snow-capped mountains, and the next wending one’s way slowly through a bristling, awe-inspiring lava-flood of vast extent, with enormous rugged masses piled up in the wildest con- fusion on either hand. Tremendous rifts extending for miles, the work of quite recent earthquakes, are a common feature of an Icelandic landscape ; as also is the laug (pron. lurg) or hot spring, where boiling water bubbles forth like cold in an ordinary spring in less wonderful lands, and a cloud of steam ascends like the misty spray that marks where a mighty river leaps into space. Often, also, will this be seen beckoning the tourist to direct his footsteps to waterfalls unsurpassed in Europe for height, or the gloomy grandeur of the chasms into which the impetuous waters leap; for Iceland is indeed rich in magnificent cascades and picturesque rapids, three of its principal rivers coursing down- ward over a thousand feet in a distance of a few miles. It is hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that even Captain Burton, with his world-wide experience, wrote thus enthusiastically of travel in Iceland. Premising that ‘ nowhere, even in the fairest portions, can we expect the dense forest on the Alp, “up to the summit clothed with green”; the warbling of birds, the murmur of innumerable bees, the susurrus of the morning breeze, or the melodious whispering of the “velvet forest”;’ the veteran traveller continues, ‘ their places are taken by the black rock and glittering ice, by the wild roar of the foss, and by the mist cloud hung to the rugged hill-side. We may not look for that prodigality of colour with which sun and air paint the scenery of the happier south. . . . But during the delight- fully mild and pleasant weather of July and August, seen through a medium of matchless purity, there is much to admire in the rich meads and leas stretching to meet the light-blue waves; in the fretted and angular outlines of the caverned hills, the abodes of giant and dwarf; in the towering walls of huge horizontal steps

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