Читать книгу Across the Vatna Jökull; or, Scenes in Iceland. Being a Description of Hitherto Unkown Regions онлайн

4 страница из 32

As I intended to travel as fast as I could to the seat of our summer’s work, I had a change of horses for riding and for the pack-boxes. This is absolutely necessary where anything like hard riding is contemplated, but it is by no means essential where time is not an object. After some delay incidental to reducing the baggage to a portable shape and proportion, which is always a matter of some difficulty at the commencement of either an equestrian or pedestrian journey, we took leave of the remainder of our friends, and accompanied by Paul and another Icelander, we pursued our way eastward, over the roughest path imaginable, towards Eyrarbakki, amid the gathering gloom of what turned out to be a wet and miserable day. It is always necessary to take an extra man to help during the first day’s journey, for the horses are always more unruly and obstinate the first day or two. This is especially the case where the route is a rough one, like that towards Eyrarbakki. The first part of our course lay over a series of ancient lava streams, upon which the scant herbage was being cropped by a few miserable sheep which had escaped the hand of the shearer; their dirty, ragged coats had been partly torn from their backs by the crags among which they had scrambled, giving them a deplorable appearance quite in keeping with the forbidding aspect of the country and the miserable day. About midday we reached the wretched little farm of Lœkjarbotn. It boasted nothing but squalor, stock-fish, and dirty children. I do not know why it is, but most of the farms in the immediate neighbourhood of Reykjavík are of the poorest and most wretched description. It is true their pastures in most cases are poorer than those of other parts of the country, but there is a great difference in the people also. No one can help noticing a settled look of contented despair in their countenance, scarcely to be wondered at considering their surroundings, which, in this particular instance, seemed as much like hopeless wretchedness as anything I had ever seen. Ah, well! our horses are rested, we have waded through the slush pools and the mire which front that heterogeneous mound of lava blocks, turf, and timber, which we can scarcely conceive anyone, by any stretch of sentimental imagination, calling home. Our horses struggled down the steep mound of slippery mud which by no means assists travellers either to arrive at or depart from Lœkjarbotn. Leaving this little patch of stagnant misery behind us, we come upon the desolate lava, the dank mists from the adjacent mountains wrapping themselves around us, a driving rain beating into our faces, and a nipping wind exaggerating our discomfort, and assisting the rain to find out the weak places in our mackintosh armour.