The view from _Hekla_ is superb. The eye is first arrested by the ridges of lava, black, red, gray, horrent and ill-boding which extend down the mountain slopes and bury themselves in the fertile soil of the distant plains. Each of the two main ridges bisects a well watered section, once fertile and now choked with sand. To the northwest, _Láng Jökull_ raises its two score miles of ice-parapet, four hundred miles of unexplored Iceland; to the northeast is spread out the vast expanse of mighty _Vatna Jökull_, Mountain-Producing-Waters, an area of ice-covered tableland one hundred miles by sixty; between these two glaciers and directly north of us stands _Hofs Jökull_, _Hof_ signifying heathen-temple, it is nearly circular and appears like the frosted dome of a mammoth cake. Between the last two _Jökulls_, stretching away into the northeast, is the _Sprengisandur_, Bursting-Sands, a mighty desert entirely void of vegetation, a dreary, desolate tract, wind-driven and life-destroying. Nearer, in the emerald plain flow the glacier-born rivers the _Thjórsá_ and the _Hvitá_ and a cloud of saffron sand floats in the air above the desert which we crossed yesterday. We cannot see the travellers but surely there is a train of horses there and the wind is lifting the fine sand into the sun. Turn now to the southward, look down along the tumbled chimneys and the red hornitos of _Hekla_ and the first object to arrest the eye is the beautiful _Tindfjallajökull_, Peaked-Ice-Mountain, with its two ice-horns resembling the Matterhorn, protruding from an oval mound of lava and casting their blue shadows on the trackless snow. Behind this mountain is the _Saga_ country of the South, the home of the noble _Njal_ and the peerless _Gunnar_. There was the scene of Iceland’s great Epic, Burnt Njal. Those ribbons of limpid silver that branch from the base of _Goðalands Jökull_, Land-of-the-Gods, like reins from the hand of a chariot driver, those are the many branches of the _Markarfljót_, Boundary-Marking-River, pouring down its floods of glacial waters and volcanic sands to choke the passage in an effort to join _Heimaey_ to the mainland. Across the moors, the sheep ranges and the marshes beyond, the North Atlantic, encircling the black masses of the Westman Islands, wreathes those weathered pillars with garlands of snow-white foam. The descending clouds and the falling snow suddenly shut off the view, but the camera of the eye has caught it all in a circling panorama and the prints are stored in memory’s folder to be opened at leisure. The infinite waste of the lava billows, grandeur rising from desolation, the flash of the restless rivers, the quiet of the happy plain,—these are but the halftones in Iceland’s matchless print.