Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1874-06-26
Iceland.

Iceland Is most easily described by neg
atives. There are no trees, though appar-
emily there were plenty in the tenth centu-
ry, when we hear OF men hiding among
them and being hanged from them.
No corn is grown, nor any other crop, ex-
cept few turnips and potatoes which taste
only half-ripe. The only wild quadrupeds
are the blue fox (who has probably come as
the white boar now and then does, on ice
foes from Groenland) and the reindeer
the latter introduced about century ago,
and still uncommon, ranging over the des-
ert mountains. There 10 no town except
the capital, a city OF 1900 people, no other
place desc wing TO be called even a village,
unless 1t be the hamlet Of Akureyri, on the
shore Of the Arctic ocean, with some fifty
houses no inns (savs In that one village,
whose resources consist Of two beds, a sim
gle jug and basin, and q billiard tablet no
hens, ducks or geese Except wild geese),
no pigs, no donkeys, no roads, no carriages,
no shops, no manufacturers, no dissenters
from the established Lutheranism, no ar
my, navy, volunteers, or other guardians
of public order Except one policeman in
Reykjavik), no criminals, only two law
yers, and, finally, no snakes. "What, then,
is there ?" Snow mountains, glaciers, hot
springs, volcanoes, earthquakes, northern
lights, ravens, morasses, and, above all,
deserts. Or rather-there is the desert
For Iceland-and this is a point which
none of the books OF travel bring out-Ice-
land is really one vast desert fringed by
IF x,li b.
more level parts of the coast, and here and
there runs up the valleys Of the great riv
ers into the interior. Aud a desert in Ice
land does not mean merely land waste
and solitary, such as large parts of Scot
land aud Ireland have become, but land
that has always been and will always be
desolate-land bare and drear, treeess,
shrubless, CRASHES, where not a sheep or
pony can browse, and where by conse-
quence man can never plant his dwelling.
OF this great ceutral space a part is occu-
pied by snow fields. One tremendous mass,
out of which the highest peaks of the is
land rise covers all area of some four thous-
and square miles, has never been crossed
and never will be. The mountains are lot
very high but then the level of perpetual
snow is only some 5000 feet above the sea,
and the larger glaciers descend almost to
the sea-level. Other parts are filled by vol
canic mountains surrounded by fields OF
lava, sometimes, like the great Odaoa
Hraun, spreading over hundreds of miles,
and not ouly barren but waterless. The
rest is an undulating waste of black rolcan-
ic sand and pebbles, or perhaps, what is
most dismal of all, an expanse of bare
earth strewed with loose blocks of stone,
from among which no herb springs, over
which the nimble pony can hardly pick its
way. On the lava fields one may have at
least shrublets OF dwarf birch and willow,
nesting, with n few tiny ferns, in tue
chlnks and hollows OF the moldering rock,
but on these stony wastes all is desolation
not a flower, not an insect, not bird,
except the sombre raven, Odin's compan-
ion, least OF all sign OF human presence.
A far less imaginative people than the Ice
landers might easily have peopled such a
wilderness with trolls and demons.-C0rn-
hill Magazine.