This tract is a broad and fresh moraine from the recently receded glacier, chaotic, empty, vast and dreary. There is nothing to relieve the monotony of the scene save the increasing mass of ice as the glaciers loom higher above the stony horizon. The angular fragments of lava, somber, gray, variously riven and confusedly hurled in piles, are as though some vast mountain had been crumpled like an eggshell and the fragments scattered by a titanic hand. No touch of verdure enlivens the cold ruin and weary waste, save at the margins of the numerous ponds and pools which glimmer like sheets of light in the dim distance. Otherwise, everything everywhere is like everything everywhere else. This heath is similar to the vast interior of Iceland, except that the traces of vegetation found here are often entirely wanting throughout large sections, notably north of _Hoffs Jökull_, as my pack train had occasion to testify in the summer of 1913. There are large sections of bristling lava, life-destroying sands and death-presaging glaciers which man has never explored. All day we rode to the southward, and, save the wild swan on the ponds, no living creature crossed our trail. It was three in the afternoon before we found sufficient grass to afford the hungry ponies a bite; this was at the margin of a pool of glacial water that had filtered through the moraines. We regaled ourselves from the contents of our packing boxes, rested an hour, changed saddle horses and then pushed on over an unusually rough mass of terminal moraine at the foot of _Láng Jökull_. We turned towards the southwest, crossed a bog and arrived at the small _saelhus_, refuge, at _Arnavatn_, Eagle-Lake. This shelter of turf and stones was built for the protection of the sheep gatherers, who resort hither in the autumn to gather the sheep that have strayed to the highlands during the long summer. [Illustration: _The Glacier of Láng Jökull in the Kaldidalr._ _Láng Jökull._ _Eiriks Jökull._ _Glaciers and Moraine on Arnavatnsheiði._]