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The lava accumulated in formidable masses, and fragments of scoriae and pumice-stone weighing two hundredweight were thrown to a distance of a league and a half; while the ice and snow which had lain on the mountain for centuries were liquefied, and rolled in devastating torrents over the plains. Hekla is not the only volcanic mountain of Iceland.
After an absence of twelve hours, Madame Pfeiffer reached Salsun in safety. Six-and-twenty eruptions of Hekla have been recorded, the last having occurred in 1845-46. One was prolonged for a period of six years, spreading desolation over a country which had formerly been the seat of a prosperous settlement, and burying the cultivated fields beneath a flood of lava, scoriae, and ashes.
He had immediately received an expostulatory dispatch from headquarters which henceforth shut his mouth but he had told the simple truth, and how embarrassing that was became evident when, on the very table around which the savants were now assembled, three dispatches were laid in quick succession from the great observatories of Mount Hekla, Iceland, the North Cape, and Kamchatka, all corroborating the statement of the Mount McKinley observer, that an inexplicable veiling of faint stars had manifested itself in the boreal quarter of the sky.
Continuing her journey, she arrived at the little village of Salsun, which lies at the foot of Mount Hekla. Here she secured the services of a guide, and made preparations for the ascent of the famous volcano.
But every obstacle gives way to the resolute; and at last Madame Pfeiffer stood on the topmost peak of Hekla. Here she made a discovery: in books of travel she had read of the crater of Mount Hekla, but a careful survey convinced her that none existed. There was neither opening, crevasse, nor sunken wall; in fact, no sign of a crater.
From the Geysirs, Madame Pfeiffer proceeded towards Hekla; and at the village of Thorfustadir, on the route, had an opportunity of seeing an Icelandic funeral. On entering the church she found the mourners consoling themselves with a dram of brandy.
The next day, about eighty miles south of the latitude of Mount Hekla, I sighted a big ship, which turned out to be the French cruiser Lazare Tréport. I boarded and overhauled her during three hours, her upper, main, and armoured deck, deck by deck, to her lowest black depths, even childishly spying up the tubes of her two big, rusted turret-guns.
That glossy, coal-black, shining lava, which is never porous, can be found only at Hekla and in its immediate vicinity; but the other varieties, jagged, porous, and vitrified, are also met with, though they are invariably black, as is the sand which covers the side of the mountain. As the distance from the volcano increases, the lava loses its jet-black colour, and fades into an iron-gray.
"Here, on the topmost peak of Hekla," writes Madame Pfeiffer, "I could look down far and wide upon the uninhabited land, the image of a torpid nature, passionless, inanimate, and yet sublime, an image which, once seen, can never be forgotten, and the remembrance of which will compensate me amply for all the toils and difficulties I have endured.
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