ICELAND

Pointed snow summits emerging above pink clouds and blue water was our first picture of Iceland, and all one wonderful day we watched the mountains assume more solid form, and could scarce believe our eyes when we came abreast of the vast Jokull ice fields which reached very nearly to the sea; gradually the coast became less wintry in aspect, and as we got around to the west side and passed between the Westmann Islands we could see grass on the hill slopes.

The approach to the harbor of Reykjavik was during a ten o'clock simultaneous sunset and moon rise, and our anchor was hardly down before we were greeted by a boat load of young women and men, who made a circle of our ship singing their native songs. The town of Reykjavik has no beauty; the houses are of wood covered with corrugated iron as a protection against fire, and have none of the picturesqueness of the little fishing village of Thorshavn. The harbor was large and occupied by a number of whaling or fishing boats, and on a clear day must have been rather fine in its setting of snow-patched mountains, but clouds hung low on the 11th of July veiling the sun sufficiently to interfere with taking photographs. The country around the town was destitute of trees or color, and the hills were not high enough to be impressive. Even a New England farmer would be in despair at the stones of Iceland, and one is surprised to see any grass or plant growth when one looks at the unpromising soil, if it can be called that. I believe the flowers and vegetables I saw in the yards in the town must have been grown on imported earth, and yet there were little fields of fairly thick grass which was most carefully cherished as hay for the ponies. One man came to the gate of his yard when he saw me looking at his garden, and we had a peculiar talk, he knowing no English and very little German and I no Danish, so the Latin names of the plants furnished our means of communication. His plants looked as if they had been set out about a year, and I understood that they were not all native and certainly the trees were dwarfed and pathetic in appearance; he had growing the mountain ash and sycamore maple both 5–6 feet tall, Ribes alpina,

Lonicera (?) in bloom, rhubarb, potatoes, poppies, and young cabbages, Caragana Sibirica, and either a geranium or a malva. In another garden I observed tulips, phlox, forget-me-nots, Sorbus, and, on a new lawn, a bunch of Corprinus. On a drive a couple of miles inland to see the hot springs where the women wash their clothes, I noticed patches of pink thyme in among the stones, and, where the ground was wet, cotton grass and real grass and a number of little inconspicuous things were taking

FIG. 1. On the road between Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Salmon River. thyme, Statice and Silene maritima, Polygonum viviparum and some other little plants growing in scattered clumps among the stones.

Pink

advantage of favorable conditions, such as Statice maritima, Silene maritima and S. acaulis, Polygonum viviparum, Alchemilla alpina, Galium verum, and Tofieldia palustris.

There was a pony race in the afternoon after a very good concert, and it took place on a great level plain which was one mass of little stones with about a dozen plants in a square yard; a desolate spot but gay with people gathered from the ends of the

earth watching those sturdy, fleet little horses scamper over the

course.

AKREYRI

As the clouds lifted in the late afternoon of the 12th we found we were close to the north coast, which here shows plainly its volcanic origin as the mountains were craters or half craters of considerable height and regularity, every basin and flank touched with patches of snow; and it was surprising how level the layers of rock or lava deposits were, seldom tipped or broken though worn by weather into cathedral columns, or when painted by the

FIG. 2. Bell Sound, Spitzbergen; in foreground Saxifraga, oppositifolia, Dryas octopetala and Cassiope tetragona.

rosy rays of a low evening sun, turned into veritable Valhallas, fit abodes for northern heroes. We wound far up a beautiful fiord to a whaling station and saw four dead monsters, and met another being towed in by a little tug hardly bigger than the whale. The settlement of Akreyri, which is called the second. largest town of Iceland, is situated at the end of a long fiord and surrounded by high hills, which here have retreated a short dis

tance from the water, leaving lower grassy slopes which make good farms for the fishermen. As at Reykjavik there was nothing attractive about the little town, and we all walked a mile inland to a brisk river which took a thirty or forty foot plunge into a small canyon. It was refreshing to sit near the falls as it was a warm day, and here was the best collecting ground I had found, both for flowering plants and mosses. Dryas octopetala

was very pretty and common; Eriophorum angustifolium and E. vaginatum, Parnassia palustris, and Viola tricolor made bright spots of color; and Pinguicula vulgaris was in cracks of the damp rocks, where Racomitrium lanuginosum and several Grimmias were mixed with Distichium capillacium, Timmia austriaca or Philonotis fontana. There were also Empetrum nigrum, Galiums, Erigeron alpina, Silene acaulis, and yarrow, dandelions, and sorrel, but no trees or shrubs.

It took us three hours to steam out of the fiord and about 7 P. M. we crossed the Arctic circle and had a call from Neptune, who invited us to be present at the baptismal ceremonies on deck the next afternoon, and then he disappeared astern floating away in a smoking barrel. We could scarcely believe we were within the Arctic circle it was so mild, only 55° F. on deck after dinner, and the sun gave up any attempt at setting. The next two days at sea however were cooler, and in the evening we sighted an ice floe off to the northwest where Greenland was not very far away, and the thermometer said only 39° F.

SPITZBERGEN

It was pleasant to have reached a place where the birds were so tame and so numerous as at Advent Bay. There were funny ones, puffins I think, which could not rise from the water but flapped their wings frantically and half walked in a zigzag path, graceful gulls often sitting on the icy water within ten or twenty feet of the boats, and many others I did not know, and all in great numbers. The island is well named Spitzbergen, its peaks are generally very pointed, very steep and pretty much covered with snow, and the valleys are filled with great glaciers whose ends break off into the waters of the Bay, which is also said to be the

terminus of the Gulf Stream.

There was little floating ice, it was too late in the season. A couple of whaling boats, a steamer come to get coal from a mine recently opened which has remarkably good, hard coal, and, on the land, the mining buildings and one or two houses for the workmen, and a shanty put up for the occasional hunter, were the only signs of life in this great arena of dazzling snow, black rocks, and blue water. We brought with us the best day the isolated men had had for the year, and our pilot, a whaler of forty years experience, declared the bay was more open and the seas quieter than he had ever known them.

FIG. 3. Merok, in the Geirangerfiord, Norway. The tree is a white birch, and there are plenty of flowers and grass and other birches part way up the mountains, which are perhaps 4,000 feet high.

We went ashore merely to say we had set foot on Spitzbergen, and wondered why otherwise we took the trouble, it looked so uninteresting. At the point where we landed there was a plateau of great extent about six feet above the level of the shingle beach, and composed of flat stones, probably left by a retreating glacier; what had looked like a barren field of rock proved to be