Identifier: yachtvoyagelette02duff (find matches)
Title: A yacht voyage. Letters from high latitudes; being some account of a voyage, in 1856, in the schooner yacht "Foam," to Iceland, Jan Mayen, and Spitzbergen
Year: 1883 (1880s)
Authors: Dufferin and Ava, Frederick Temple Blackwood, Marquis of, 1826-1902
Subjects:
Publisher: New York, J. W. Lovell co
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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,on this side of which I understood from Sigurdr our en-campment for the night was to be pitched. Judge, then, of my astonishment when, a few minutesafterwards, I was arrested in full career by a tremendousprecipice, or rather chasm, which suddenly gaped beneathmy feet, and completely separated the barren plateau wehad been so painfully traversing from a lovely, gay, sunlitflat, ten miles broad, that lay—sunk at a level lower by ahundred feet—between us and the opposite mountains. Iwas never so completely taken by surprise ; Sigurdrs pur-posely vague description of our halting-place was account-ed for. We had reached the famous Almanna Gja. Like ablack rampart in the distance, the corresponding chasm ofthe Hrafna Gja cut across the lower slope of the distanthills, and between them now slept in beauty and sunshinethe broad verdant ^ plain of Thingvalla. Ages ago,—who shall say how long.?—some vast com- I The plain of Thingvalla is in a great measure clothed with birchbrushwood.
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VII.J ALMANNA GJA. 57 motion shook the foundations of the island, and bubblingup from sources far away amid the inland hills, a fiery del-uge must have rushed down between their ridges, until,escaping from the narrower gorges, it found space tospread itself into one broad sheet of molten stone over anentire district of countr), reducing its varied surface toone vast blackened level. One of two things then occurred: either the vitrifiedmass contracting as it cooled,—the centre area of fiftysquare miles burst asunder at either side from the adjoin-ing plateau, and sinking down to its present level, left thetwo parallel Gjas, or chasms, which form its lateral bound-aries, to mark the limits of the disruption; or else, whilethe pith or marrow of the lava was still in a fluid state, itsupper surface became solid, and formed a roof beneathwhich the molten stream flowed on to lower levels, leavinga vast cavern into which the upper crust subsequentlyplumped down.^ The enclosed section will

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