It is, he says, an unfortunate Geyser, with so little command over its temper and stomach, that you can get a _rise_ out of it whenever you like. Nothing more is necessary than to collect a quantity of sods and throw them down its funnel. As it has no basin to protect it from these liberties, you can approach to the very edge of the pipe, which is about five feet in diameter, and look down at the boiling water perpetually seething at the bottom. In a few minutes the dose of turf just administered begins to disagree with it; it works itself up into “an awful passion;” tormented by the qualms of incipient sickness, it groans and hisses, and boils up, and spits at you with malicious vehemence, until at last, with a roar of mingled pain and rage, it throws up into the air a column of water forty feet high, carrying with it all the sods that have been thrown in, and scattering them, scalded and half-digested, at your feet. So irritated has the poor thing’s stomach become by the discipline it has undergone, that even long after all foreign matter has been thrown off, it continues retching and sputtering, until at last nature is exhausted, when, sobbing and sighing to itself, it sinks back into the bottom of its den. The ground around the Geysers, for about a quarter of a mile, looks as if it had been “honeycombed by disease into numerous sores and orifices;” not a blade of grass grew on its hot, inflamed surface, which consisted of unwholesome-looking red livid clay, or crumpled shreds and shards of slough-like incrustations. * * * * * A region, corresponding in character to the desert mountain-mass we have been describing, stretches westward from it to the extremity of the ridge of the Snaefield Syssel, and terminates in the remarkable cone of Snaefield Jokul. The island coasts exhibit a singularly broken outline, and the deep lochs or fiords, like those of Norway, only less romantic, dip into the interior for many miles, and throw off numerous branches. These fiords are wild and gloomy; dark, still inlets, with precipices on either side, a thousand feet in height, and the silence unbroken, save by the occasional wash of the waters, or the scream of a solitary ocean-bird. Inland, however, they assume a gentler character: they end in long narrow valleys, watered by pleasant streams, and bright with pasture. In these bits of Arcadia the inhabitants have built their towns and villages. In the valleys on the north coast, which are adorned by clumps of willow and juniper, the soil is comparatively fertile; but the most genial scenery is found on the east, where, in some places, the birch-trees reach a height of twenty feet, and are of sufficient size to be used in house-building. The fuel used by the Icelanders is the drift-wood which the Gulf Stream brings from Mexico, the Carolinas, Virginia, and the River St. Lawrence.