Only the coasts of the island are inhabited, while the interior is a desolate, lifeless, and almost unexplored waste of lava plains, bogs, volcanic mountains, and ice-filled valleys. The people live in huts built of wrecked timbers, picked up in the western fiords, or of blocks of lava roofed with turf. They cultivate forlorn little patches of oats and watery potatoes, raise flocks of lean, long-legged sheep, herds of black cattle, and shaggy ponies about the size of those that come from the Shetland Islands. They gather and export sulphur, Iceland moss, and the downy breast-feathers with which the eider-duck has lined her nest. Above all, they fish for cod, halibut, ling, haddock, and herring. But for the fish with which its surrounding ocean teems, the island would have long ago been abandoned to its icebergs and volcanoes. To these northern people fish is what bread and meat are to us. They eat it from year’s end to year’s end, and exchange it for all the other scanty necessities of their lives. They even feed their ponies, cattle, and sheep on dried fish during severe winters, after their meagre supply of coarse hay has given out. Fish are everything to Iceland, and it seems to furnish everything to them; for they swarm by millions in its waters. After them up into those wild seas go the fishing boats of England, France, Denmark, Norway, and even far away Massachusetts in New England; and after them had now come the good schooner _Fish-hawk_ of Gloucester, bringing Breeze McCloud in her crew. In this far northern latitude the midsummer sun is only out of sight, below the horizon, for about two hours, or from eleven o’clock in the evening until one o’clock in the morning; and at midnight, or the darkest hour, the twilight is hardly to be distinguished from the high noon of a cloudy day. As the time of the _Fish-hawk’s_ reaching Iceland was about the middle of June, she sailed in unbroken daylight, and consequently the lamps were not lighted in the only two light-houses of which the island can boast, one on Cape Reykjaines and the other at the entrance to Reykjavik harbor. About nine o’clock in the evening they passed the Mealsack, which, rising from the sea about fifteen miles from the Smoking Cape, is one of the most remarkable rocks of the world. It is nearly round, about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and its black, rugged sides rise sheer and straight for two hundred feet above the surface of the water. Its top is snowy white, from the excrement of the innumerable sea-fowl that circle screaming above it, and find rude resting-places in its crevices, or on its spray-wet ledges. It is perhaps needless to say that no human being has ever trod its summit, or even effected a landing upon it.