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A better man never lived, or if he did, he could be better spared at Reykjavik. To my great discontent, I found it indispensable to have five horses, although I proposed making the trip entirely without baggage.
A couple of hours' ride across the lava plain we had previously traversed brought us to a river, where our Reykjavik friends, after showing us a salmon weir, finally took their leave, with many kind wishes for our prosperity.
His sister, Miss Jonasen, is a very charming young lady, well educated and intelligent. She speaks English quite fluently, and does the honors of the executive mansion with an easy grace scarcely to be expected in this remote part of the world. Both are natives of Iceland. I should be sorry to be understood as intimating, in my brief sketch of Reykjavik, that it is destitute of refined society.
And yet had it been twice as bad, what we have seen would have more than repaid us, though it has been no child's play to get to see it. But I must begin where I left off in my last letter, just, I think, as we were getting under way, to be towed by the "Reine Hortense" out of Reykjavik Harbour.
But the fact of the last French man-of-war which sailed in that direction never having returned, has made those seas needlessly unpopular at Reykjavik. It was during one of these fogs that Captain Fotherby, the original discoverer of Jan Mayen, stumbled upon it in 1614.
Little did I expect, however, the spectacle which awaited us when we reached the peninsula of Sneffels, where agglomerations of nature's ruins form a kind of terrible chaos. Some two hours or more after we had left the city of Reykjavik, we reached the little town called Aoalkirkja, or the principal church. It consists simply of a few houses not what in England or Germany we should call a hamlet.
They informed us that His Imperial Highness had reached Reykjavik two days after we had left, that he had encamped last night at Thingvalla, and might be expected here in about four hours: they themselves having come on in advance to prepare for his arrival.
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!
The earlier turfbuilt farmhouses have now been replaced by comfortable concrete buildings which get their electricity from a source of water power virtually inexhaustible. Many of these, e. g. the majority of houses in Reykjavík are heated by water from hot springs, so that the purity of the northern air is seldom spoilt by smoke from coal-fires.
You will make a harvest of curious observations. In the first place, how do you propose to get to Sneffels?" "By sea. I shall cross the bay. Of course that is the most rapid route." "Of course. But still it cannot be done." "Why?" "We have not an available boat in all Reykjavik," replied the other. "What is to be done?" "You must go by land along the coast.
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