MOUNT HEKLA[5]

(ICELAND)

SIR RICHARD F. BURTON

The Hekla of our ingenuous childhood, when we believed in the “Seven Wonders of the World,” was a mighty cone, a “pillar of heaven,” upon whose dreadful summit white, black, and sanguine red lay in streaks and patches, with volumes of sooty smoke and lurid flames, and a pitchy sky. The whole was somewhat like the impossible illustrations of Vesuvian eruptions, in body-colours, plus the ice proper to Iceland. The Hekla of reality, No. 5 in the island scale, is a commonplace heap, half the height of Hermon, and a mere pigmy compared with the Andine peaks, rising detached from the plains, about three and a half miles in circumference, backed by the snows ofTindafjall and Torfajökull, and supporting a sky-line that varies greatly with the angle under which it is seen. Travellers usually make it a three-horned Parnassus, with the central knob highest—which is not really the case. From the south-west, it shows now four, then five, distinctpoints; the north-western lip of the northern crater, which hides the true apex; the south-western lip of the same; the north-eastern lip of the southern crater, which appears the culminating point, and the two eastern edges of the southern bowls. A pair of white patches represents the “eternal snows.” On the right of the picture is the steep, but utterly unimportant Thrihyrningr, crowned with its benchmark; to the left, the Skardsfjall, variegated green and black; and in the centre, the Bjólfell, a western buttress of the main building, which becomes alternately a saddleback, a dorsum, and an elephant’s head, trunk, and shoulders.

We came upon the valley of the Western Rángá[6]at a rough point, a gash in the hard yellow turf-clad clay, dotted with rough lava blocks, and with masses of conglomerate, hollowed, turned, and polished by water: the shape was a succession of S, and the left side was the more tormented. Above the ford a dwarf cascade had been formed by the lava of ’45, which caused the waters to boil, and below the ford jumped a second, where the stream forks. We then entered an Iceland “forest,” at least four feet high; the “chapparal” was composed of red willow (Salix purpurea), of Grá-vidir, woolly-leaved willow (Sulix lapponum), the “tree under which the devil flayed the goats”—a diabolical difficulty, when the bush is a foot high—and the awful and venerable birch, “la demoiselle des fôrets,” which has so often “blushed with patrician blood.” About mid-afternoonwe reached Næfrholt (birch-bark hill), the “fashionable” place for the ascent, and we at once inquired for the guide. Upon thecarpe diemprinciple, he had gone to Reykjavik with the view of drinking his late gains; but we had time to organize another, and even alpenstocks with rings and spikes are to be found at the farm-house. Everything was painfully tourist.

In the evening we scaled the stiff slope of earth and Palagonite which lies behind, or east of Næfrholt; this crupper of Bjólfell, the Elephant Mountain, gives perhaps harder work than any part of Hekla on the normal line of ascent. From the summit we looked down upon a dwarf basin, with a lakelet of fresh water, which had a slightly (carbonic) acid taste, and which must have contained lime, as we found two kinds of shells, both uncommonly thin and fragile. Three species of weeds floated off the clean sandstrips. Walking northward to a deserted byre, we found the drain gushing under ground from sand and rock, forming a distinct river-valley, and eventually feeding the Western Rángá. This “Vatn” is not in the map; though far from certain that it is not mentioned by Mackenzie, we named it the “Unknown Lake.” Before night fell we received a message that three English girls and their party proposed to join us. This was a “scare,” but happily the Miss Hopes proved plucky as they were young and pretty, and we rejoiced in offering this pleasant affront of the feminine foot to that grim oldsolitaire, Father Hekla.

Before the sleep necessary to prepare for the next day’s work, I will offer a few words concerning the “Etna ofthe North,” sparing the reader, however, the mortification of a regular history. It was apparently harmless, possibly dormant, tillA. D.1104, when Sæmund, the “Paris clerk,” then forty-eight years old, threw in a casket, and awoke the sleeping lion. Since that time fourteen regular eruptions, without including partial outbreaks are recorded, giving an average of about two per century. The last was in 1845. The air at Reykjavik was flavoured, it is said, like a gun that wants washing; and the sounds of a distant battle were conducted by the lava and basaltic ground. The ashes extended to Scotland. When some writers tell us that on this occasion Hekla lost 500 feet in height, “so much of the summit having been blown away by the explosions,” they forget or ignore the fact that the new crater opened laterally and low down.

Like Etna, Vesuvius, and especially Stromboli, Hekla became mythical in Middle-Age Europe, and gained wide repute as one of the gates of “Hel-viti.” Witches’ Sabbaths were held there. The spirits of the wicked, driven by those grotesque demons of Father Pinamonti which would make the fortune of a zoological society, were seen trooping into the infernal crater; and such facts as these do not readily slip off the mind of man. The Danes still say “Begone to Heckenfjæld!” the North Germans, “Go to Hackelberg!” and the Scotch consign you to “John Hacklebirnie’s house.” Even Goldsmith (Animated Nature, i. 48) had heard of the local creed, “The inhabitants of Iceland believe the bellowings of Hekla are nothing else but the cries of the damned, and that its eruptionsare contrived to increase their tortures.” Uno Van Troil (Letter I.) who in 1770, together with those “inclyti Brittannici,”BaronBank and Dr. Solander, “gained the pleasure of being the first who ever reached the summit of this celebrated volcano,” attributes the mountain’s virginity to the superstitions of the people. He writes soberly about its marvels; and he explains its high fame by its position, skirting the watery way to and from Greenland and North America. His companions show less modesty of imagination. We may concede that an unknown ascent “required great circumspection”; and that in a high wind ascensionists were obliged to lie down. But how explain the “dread of being blown into the most dreadful precipices,” when the latter do not exist? Moreover, we learn that to “accomplish this undertaking” they had to travel from 300 to 360 miles over uninterrupted bursts of lava, which is more than the maximum length of the island, from northeast to southwest. As will be seen, modern travellers have followed suit passing well.

The next morning (July 13) broke fair and calm, reminding me

“Del bel paese la dove il sì suona.”

The Miss Hopes were punctual to a minute—an excellent thing in travelling womanhood. We rode up half-way somewhat surprised to find so few parasitic craters; the only signs of independent eruption on the western flank were the Raudkólar (red hills), as the people call their lava hornitos and spiracles, which are little bigger than the bottle-house cones of Leith.

At an impassable divide we left our poor nags to pass the dreary time, without water or forage, and we followed the improvised guide, who caused not a little amusement. His general port was that of a bear that has lost its ragged staff.—I took away his alpenstock for one of the girls—and he was plantigrade rather than cremnobatic; he had stripped to his underalls, which were very short, whilst his stockings were very long and the heraldic gloves converted his hands to paws. The two little snow fonds (“steep glassy slopes of hard snow”), were the easiest of walking. We had nerved ourselves to “Break neck or limbs, be maimed or boiled alive,” but we looked in vain for the “concealed abysses,” for the “crevasses to be crossed,” and for places where a “slip would be to roll to destruction.” We did not sight the “lava wall,” a capital protection against giddiness. The snow was anything but slippery; the surface was scattered with dust, and it bristled with a forest of dwarf earth-pillars, where blown volcanic sand preserved the ice. After a slow hour and a half, we reached the crater of ’45, which opened at 9A. M.on September 2, and discharged lava till the end of November. It might be passed unobserved by the inexperienced man. The only remnant is the upper lip prolonged to the right; the dimensions may have been 120 by 150 yards, and the cleft shows a projecting ice-ledge ready to fall. The feature is well-marked by the new lava-field of which it is the source: the bristly “stone-river” is already degrading to superficial dust. A little beyond this bowl the ground smokes, discharging snow-steam made visible by the cold air. Hencedoubtless those sententious travellers “experienced at one and the same time, a high degree of heat and cold.”

Fifteen minutes more led us to the First or Southern Crater, whose Ol-bogi (elbow or rim) is one of the horns conspicuous from below. It is a regular formation about 100 yards at the bottom each way, with the right (east) side red and cindery, and the left yellow and sulphury; mosses and a few flowerets grow on the lips; in the sole rise jets of steam and a rock-rib bisects it diagonally from northeast to southwest. We thought it the highest point of the volcano, but theaneroid corrected our mistake.

From the First Crater we walked over the left or western dorsum, over which one could drive a coach, and we congratulated one another upon the exploit. Former travellers “balancing themselves like rope-dancers, succeeded in passing along the ridge of slags which was so narrow that there was scarcely room for their feet,” the breadth being “not more than two feet, having a precipice on each side several hundred feet in depth.” Charity suggests that the feature has altered, but there was no eruption between 1766 and 1845; moreover, the lip would have diminished, not increased. And one of the most modern visitors repeats the “very narrow ridge,” with the classical but incorrect adjuncts of “Scylla here, Charybdis there.” Scylla (say the crater slope) is disposed at an angle of 30°, and Mr. Chapman coolly walked down this “vast” little hollow. I descended Charybdis (the outer counterscarp) far enough to make sure that it is equally easy.

Passing the “carriage road” (our own name), we crossedanévéwithout any necessity for digging foot-holes. It lies where sulphur is notably absent. The hot patches which account for the freedom from snow, even so high above the congelation-line, are scattered about the summit: in other parts the thermometer, placed in an eighteen-inch hole, made earth colder than air. After a short climb we reached the apex; the ruddy-walled northeastern lip of the Red Crater (No. 2): its lower or western rim forms two of the five summits seen from the prairie, and hides the highest point. We thus ascertained that Hekla is a linear volcano of two mouths, or three including that of ’45, and that it wants a true apical crater. But how reconcile the accounts of travellers? Pliny Miles found one cone and three craters; Madam Ida Pfeiffer, like Metcalfe, three cones and no crater.

On the summit the guides sang a song of triumph, whilst we drank to the health of our charming companions and, despite the cold wind which eventually drove us down, carefully studied the extensive view. The glorious day was out of character with a sceneniente che Montagne, as the unhappy Venetians described the Morea; rain and sleet and blinding snow would better have suited the picture, but happily they were conspicuous by their absence. Inland, beyond a steep snow-bed unpleasantly crevassed, lay a grim photograph all black and white; Lángjökull looking down upon us with a grand and freezing stare; the Hrafntinnu Valley marked by a dwarf cone, and beyond where streams head, the gloomy regions stretching to the Sprengisandur, dreary wastes of utter sterility, howling deserts of dark ashes,wholly lacking water and vegetable life, and wanting the gleam and the glow which light up the Arabian wild. Skaptár and Oræfa were hidden from sight. Seawards, ranging from west to south, the view, by contrast, was a picture of amenity and civilization. Beyond castellated Hljódfell and conical Skjaldbreid appeared the familiar forms of Esja, and the long lava projection of the Gold Breast country, melting into the western main. Nearer stretched the fair lowlands, once a broad deep bay, now traversed by the network of Ölfusá, Thjórsá, and the Markarfljót; while the sixfold bunch of the Westman Islands, mere stone lumps upon a blue ground, seemingly floating far below the raised horizon, lay crowned by summer sea. Eastward we distinctly traced the Fiskivötn. Run the eye along the southern shore, and again the scene shifts. Below the red hornitos of the slope rises the classical Three-horned, not lofty, but remarkable for its trident top;Tindfjall (tooth-fell) with its two horns or pyramids of ice, casting blue shadows upon the untrodden snow; and the whole mighty mass known as the Eastern Jökull Eyjafjall (island-fell), so called from the black button of rock which crowns the long white dorsum; Kátlá (Költu-gjá), Merkrjökull, and Godalands, all connected by ridges, and apparently neither lofty nor impracticable.

Ultima Thule; or a Summer in Iceland(London and Edinburgh, 1875).

FOOTNOTES:[5]Heklu-fjall derives from Hekla (akin to Hökull, a priest’s cope), meaning a cowled or hooded frock, knitted of various colours, and applied to the “Vesuvius of the North” from its cap and body vest of snow. Icelanders usually translate it a chasuble, because its rounded black shoulders bear stripes of white, supposed to resemble the cross carried to Calvary.[6]Rángá (“wrong,” or crooked stream) is a name that frequently occurs, and generally denotes either that the trend is opposed to the general water-shed, or that an angle has been formed in the bed by earthquakes or eruptions.

[5]Heklu-fjall derives from Hekla (akin to Hökull, a priest’s cope), meaning a cowled or hooded frock, knitted of various colours, and applied to the “Vesuvius of the North” from its cap and body vest of snow. Icelanders usually translate it a chasuble, because its rounded black shoulders bear stripes of white, supposed to resemble the cross carried to Calvary.

[6]Rángá (“wrong,” or crooked stream) is a name that frequently occurs, and generally denotes either that the trend is opposed to the general water-shed, or that an angle has been formed in the bed by earthquakes or eruptions.

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