Note 343 — Chapter II · THE LANDFALL—FISHING FLEET—TO REYKJAVIK.

Several Icelanders (see Dr W. Lauder Lindsay) have visited the rift which engulphed Katla, the murderess and suicide; a name well known by the translation of Powell and Magnússon. “G. H. C.,” before quoted, who explored it in August 1874, after being misled by the map, found on the southern face “a deep circular indentation where black volcanic sand could be seen uncovered by snow and ice.” We can now explain by the usual method the glacier which, according to Professor Steenstrŭp, was torn from its moorings in 1721 by water within or below: evidently the heated ground melted the whole of the upper calotte and caused the catastrophe. Other traces were concealed by the snow-fall which, consolidating into glacier-ice, accumulates annually twenty feet, and fourteen years have elapsed since the last eruption. The guides were surprised that “their natural foe should present phenomena of a character no more startling and tremendous. What had they expected to find? Perhaps a vast yawning gulf, over whose edge might be watched the spirit of Katla, whirling like a second Francesca di Rimini in the sulphurous depths below.” Yet Henderson could descry from Skaptafell “the aqua-igneous volcano Kötlu-giá, whose tremendously yawning crater was distinctly visible” (i. 264).