We were nearing _Hekla_, Hooded, so named from the hood of cloud that nearly always caps the summit. Evidences of its ten centuries and more of destruction were all around us in deserts of ash and sand, ruined farms, once the finest in the land, fragments and masses of lava that had been hurled fifteen and twenty miles in the many violent explosions from the craters of the volcano and the changed water courses that had been blocked by the flowing lava or choked by the drifting sand. In single file the ponies waded through the fine red, yellow and black sand and the dust kicked up by the troup literally obscured the leaders. The wind sifted the fine, gritty material through every needle-hole in our clothing; it filled our hair, blinded the eyes and produced miniature mud-cakes in the mouth. An hour of this work satisfied us and we rejoiced as we edged into a partly turfed section of the plain. Here the sheep in scattered groups of three to fifteen marked the outskirts of the grazing land and turning towards them we soon entered a long, narrow strip of excellent grass land between two masses of the recent lava flow. On approaching a farm we noted how the farmer had constructed a series of wind-breaks of stone to keep the sifting sand from encroaching too vigorously upon the mowing land. There is very little good turf in this section for fence building and the barbed wire has been substituted. How out of place it is in Iceland! It is ugly enough when hidden in the brush of a back pasture in New England but when it stands out bare and threatening above the green turf of an Icelandic meadow and supplants the grass-grown walls of ancient days, which add so much to the charm of the landscape, it is incongruous. There are several farms in the neighborhood of _Hekla_ which are mere fragments of their former size and to traverse the sand and lava debris of this section is to realize a little of the terrible havoc the volcano has spread around its base.