第26章 LETTER VII(8)

This event occurred in the year 1783.The preceding winter and spring had been unusually mild.Toward the end of May,a light bluish fog began to float along the confines of the untrodden tracts of Skapta,accompanied in the beginning of June by a great trembling of the earth.On the 8th of that month,immense pillars of smoke collected over the hill country towards the north,and coming down against the wind in a southerly direction,enveloped the whole district of Sida in darkness.A whirlwind of ashes then swept over the face of the country,and on the 10th,innumerable fire spouts were seen leaping and flaring amid the icy hollows of the mountain,while the river Skapta,one of the largest in the island,having first rolled down to the plain a vast volume of fetid waters mixed with sand,suddenly disappeared.

Two days afterwards a stream of lava,issuing from sources to which no one has ever been able to penetrate,came sliding down the bed of the dried-up river,and in a little time,--though the channel was six hundred feet deep and two hundred broad,--the glowing deluge overflowed its banks,crossed the low country of Medalland,ripping the turf up before it like a table-cloth,and poured into a great lake whose affrighted waters flew hissing and screaming into the air at the approach of the fiery intruder.Within a few more days the basin of the lake itself was completely filled,and having separated into two streams,the unexhausted torrent again recommenced its march;in one direction overflowing soiree ancient lava fields,--in the other,re-entering the channel of the Skapta,and leaping down the lofty cataract of Stapafoss.But this was not all;while one lava flood had chosen the Skapta for its bed,another,descending in a different direction,was working like ruin within and on either side the banks of the Hverfisfliot,rushing into the plain,by all accounts,with even greater fury and velocity.Whether the two issued from the same crater it is impossible to say,as the sources of both were far away within the heart of the unapproachable desert,and even the extent of the lava flow can only be measured from the spot where it entered the inhabited districts.

The stream which flowed down Skapta is calculated to be about fifty miles in length by twelve or fifteen at its greatest breadth;that which rolled down the Hverfisfliot,at forty miles in length by seven in breadth.Where it was imprisoned,between the high banks of Skapta,the lava is five or six hundred feet thick;but as soon as it spread out into the plain its depth never exceeded one hundred feet.The eruption of sand,ashes,pumice,and lava,continued till the end of August,when the Plutonic drama concluded with a violent earthquake.

For a whole year a canopy of cinder-laden cloud hung over the island.Sand and ashes irretrievably overwhelmed thousands of acres of fertile pasturage.The Faroe islands,the Shetlands,and the Orkneys were deluged with volcanic dust,which perceptibly contaminated even the pure skies of England and Holland.Mephitic vapours tainted the atmosphere of the entire island;--even the grass,which no cinder rain had stifled,completely withered up;the fish perished in the poisoned sea.A murrain broke out among the cattle,and a disease resembling scurvy attacked the inhabitants themselves.Stephenson has calculated that 9,000men,28,000horses,11,000cattle,190,000sheep,died from the effects of this one eruption.The most moderate calculation puts the number of human deaths at upwards of 1,300;and of cattle,etc.at about 156,000.

The whole of this century had proved most fatal to the unfortunate people of Iceland.At its commencement smallpox destroyed more than 16,000persons;nearly 20,000more perished by a famine consequent on a succession of inclement seasons;while from time to time the southern coasts were considerably depopulated by the incursions of English and even Algerine pirates.

The rest of our day's journey lay through a country less interesting than the district we had traversed before luncheon.For the most part we kept on along the foot of the hills,stopping now and then for a drink of milk at the occasional farms perched upon their slopes.

Sometimes turning up a green and even bushy glen,(there are no trees in Iceland,the nearest approach to anything of the kind being a low dwarf birch,hardly worthy of being called a shrub,)we would cut across the shoulder of some projecting spur,and obtain a wider prospect of the level land upon our right;or else keeping more down in the flat,we had to flounder for half an hour up to the horses'shoulders in an Irish bog.After about five hours of this work we reached the banks of a broad and rather singular river,called the Bruara.Halfway across it was perfectly fordable;but exactly in the middle was a deep cleft,into which the waters from either side spilt themselves,and then in a collected volume roared over a precipice a little lower down.Across this cleft some wooden planks were thrown,giving the traveller an opportunity of boasting that he had crossed a river on a bridge which itself was under water.By this time we had all begun to be very tired,and very hungry;--it was 11o'clock P.M.We had been twelve or thirteen hours on horseback,not to mention occasional half-hours of pretty severe walking after the ptarmigan and plover.Many were the questions we addressed to Sigurdr on the distance yet remaining,and many the conjectures we hazarded as to whether the cook would have arrived in time to get dinner ready for us.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.