_Trans. by Cottle._ In this Ode we are told that _Surtur_ was the adversary of _Odin_, that he dwelt in the Antarctic,— “Where decked with many a shining car, Gods and great _Surtur_ rush to war.” This was on the fabled plain of _Vigriði_, where “a hundred miles around” on the wreck of the fiery elements the gods battled with their enemies and with the enemies of the mortals whom they protected. One article of the Norse mythology states that _Surtur_, the black prince of the nether regions, should come from the south and set the world on fire. Here where the devastation of volcanic fire blast is terrible, where a whole valley is filled with the scorched and blistered lava flow from the ice-crowned volcanoes, here where the great, black cavern extends for a mile under ground, the early settlers located the abode of the dread black prince, _Surtur_, and most fittingly. It was with a knowledge of this cave in his mind that Jules Verne wrote his story of “A Journey to the Center of the Earth.” Beside the entrance and on a mound of crumpled lava stands a _varða_, cairn, to mark the way. Hundreds of these cairns have been built in the past centuries throughout the travelled portions of Iceland to guide the traveller over the mountain passes, across the sandy deserts and extensive wastes of glacial moraine as well as to point the direction to places where grass may be found for the ponies. There is a style in Icelandic cairns as in women’s clothes and one can tell by their outward appearance at what period they were built. They reminded _Henderson_ of the passage in Jeremiah xxxi, 21,—“Set thee up way-marks, make thee high heaps.” A portion of the roof of the cavern fell in at some remote period and this is the entrance. We climbed down with some difficulty to the snow bank and found a ptarmigan perched upon a block of stone. I had no difficulty in approaching within ten feet and she waited for me to take two photographs. This is the largest and the longest lava tunnel known. It is not, by any means the largest cave, but the largest underground passage by which lava formerly flowed that has been explored. It was formed by the lava filling the floor of the valley and cooling on top and then draining out underneath to some lower level. It was in exactly this same manner that the great lava flow came down from _Skjalbreith_, filled _Thingvellir_ and then drained out and left the great plain between the mountains to fall to form that wonderful formation previously described in chapter six.