A corresponding chasm, but of inferior dimensions, the Hrafnagja, or Raven’s Rift, opens its black rampart to the east, about eight miles farther on; and both form the boundaries of the verdant plain of Thingvalla, which by a grand convulsion of nature has itself been shattered into innumerable small parallel crevices and fissures fifty or sixty feet deep. [Illustration: 44. THE HRAFNAGJA.] Of the Hrafnagja Mr. Ross Browne says: “A toilsome ride of eight miles brought us to the edge of the Pass, which in point of rugged grandeur far surpasses the Almannagja, though it lacks the extent and symmetry which give the latter such a remarkable effect. Here was a tremendous gap in the earth, over a hundred feet deep, hacked and shivered into a thousand fantastic shapes; the sides a succession of the wildest accidents; the bottom a chaos of broken lava, all tossed about in the most terrific confusion. It is not, however, the extraordinary desolation of the scene that constitutes its principal interest. The resistless power which had rent the great lava-bed asunder, as if touched with pity at the ruin, had also flung from the tottering cliffs a causeway across the gap, which now forms the only means of passing over the great Hrafnagja. No human hands could have created such a colossal work as this; the imagination is lost in its massive grandeur; and when we reflect that miles of an almost impassable country would otherwise have to be traversed in order to reach the opposite side of the gap, the conclusion is irresistible that in the battle of the elements Nature still had a kindly remembrance of man. [Illustration: 45. THE TINTRON ROCK.] “Five or six miles beyond the Hrafnagja, near the summit of a dividing ridge, we came upon a very singular volcanic formation, called the Tintron. It stands, a little to the right of the trail, on a rise of scoria and burnt earth, from which it juts up in rugged relief to the height of twenty or thirty feet. This is, strictly speaking, a huge clinker, not unlike what comes out of a grate--hard, glassy in spots, and scraggy all over. The top part is shaped like a shell; in the centre is a hole about three feet in diameter, which opens into a vast subterranean cavity of unknown depth. Whether the Tintron is an extinct crater, through which fires shot out of the earth in by-gone times, or an isolated mass of lava, whirled through the air out of some distant volcano, is a question that geologists must determine. The probability is that it is one of those natural curiosities so common in Iceland which defy research. The whole country is full of anomalies--bogs where one would expect to find dry land, and parched deserts where it would not seem strange to see bogs; fire where water ought to be, and water in the place of fire.” [Illustration: 46. FALL OF THE OXERAA.]