r of the spectacle was undoubted, as well as its arid and
deserted air.

As a true nephew of the great Professor Hardwigg, and despite my
preoccupation and doleful fears of what was to come, I observed with
great interest the vast collection of mineralogical curiosities spread
out before me in this vast museum of natural history. Looking back to my
recent studies, I went over in thought the whole geological history of
Iceland.

This extraordinary and curious island must have made its appearance from
out of the great world of waters at a comparatively recent date. Like
the coral islands of the Pacific, it may, for aught we know, be still
rising by slow and imperceptible degrees.

If this really be the case, its origin can be attributed to only one
cause--that of the continued action of subterranean fires.

This was a happy thought.

If so, if this were true, away with the theories of Sir Humphry Davy;
away with the authority of the parchment of Arne Saknussemm; the
wonderful pretensions to discovery on the part of my uncle--and to our
journey!

All must end in smoke.

Charmed with the idea, I began more carefully to look about me. A
serious study of the soil was necessary to negative or confirm my
hypothesis. I took in every item of what I saw, and I began to
comprehend the succession of phenomena which had preceded its formation.

Iceland, being absolutely without sedimentary soil, is composed
exclusively of volcanic tufa; that is to say, of an agglomeration of
stones and of rocks of a porous texture. Long before the existence of
volcanoes, it was composed of a solid body of massive trap rock lifted
bodily and slowly out of the sea, by the action of the centrifugal force
at work in the earth.

The internal fires, however, had not as yet burst their bounds and
flooded the exterior cake of Mother Earth with hot and raging lava.

My readers must excuse this brief and somewhat pedantic geological
lecture. But it is necessary to the complete understanding of what
follows.

At a later period in the world's history, a huge and mighty fissure
must, reasoning by analogy, have been dug diagonally from the southwest
to the northeast of the island, through which by degrees flowed the
volcanic crust. The great and wondrous phenomenon then went on without
violence--the outpouring was enormous, and the seething fused matter,
ejected from the bowels of the earth, spread slowly and peacefully in
the form of vast level pla