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Updated: May 1, 2025
If, in addition to this, you have to wait, as very often must be the case, for many hours after your own arrival, wet, tired, hungry, until the baggage-train, with the tents and food, shall have come up, with no alternative in the meantime but to lie shivering inside a grass-roofed church, or to share the quarters of some farmer's family, whose domestic arrangements resemble in every particular those which Macaulay describes as prevailing among the Scottish Highlanders a hundred years ago; and, if finally after vainly waiting for some days to see an eruption which never takes place you journey back to Reykjavik under the same melancholy conditions, it will not be unnatural that, on returning to your native land, you should proclaim Iceland, with her Geysirs, to be a sham, a delusion, and a snare!
My first care was to order coffee for the tired Frenchmen; and then feeling that long residence having given us a kind of proprietorship in the Geysirs, we were bound to do the honours of the place to the approaching band of travellers, I summoned the cook, and enlarging in a long speech on the gravity of the occasion, gave orders that he should make a holocaust of all the remaining game, and get under way a plum-pudding, whose dimensions should do himself and England credit.
At last, after another two hours' weary jogging, we descried, straight in front, a low steep brown rugged hill, standing entirely detached from the range at the foot of which we had been riding; and in a few minutes more, wheeling round its outer end, we found ourselves in the presence of the steaming Geysirs.
I have now to relate to you a most painful occurrence which has taken place during my absence at the Geysirs; no less a catastrophe, in fact, than a mutiny among my hitherto most exemplary ship's company.
As, however, it is necessary, if we are to reach Jan Mayen and Spitzbergen this summer, that our stay in Iceland should not be prolonged above a certain date, I determined at once to make preparations for our expedition to the Geysirs and the interior of the country.
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