Right thankful was I to get some warm soup and creep into the bag. One of my men--and a real good fellow he was--named Sigurð, cuddled my left foot in his arms, although my writhings kept him as well as myself awake while the others slept. I have had many parts of my body frozen, but I never suffered so much as from that toe.
After a few hours we again started; and although the sleigh travelled easily over the crust, we still broke through it, which occasioned me so much pain at every step that I sat upon the sleigh and was drawn along until we had descended so much that the crust ceased altogether. The snow terminated in a half-melted slush, lying upon a bottom of ice. Wading through the slush, which at times took us up to the waist, we next reached Kistufell, where the ice and snow terminated. Here we landed on a bed of volcanic débris, which covered the ice to such a depth that one could in no way, except by digging, distinguish it from the adjacent fjall. The Vatna Jökull now lay behind us with its mysterious recesses and volcanoes carefully guarded from intrusion by gloom and storm. To the north of us rose a cluster of mountains from which great quantities of steam were rising, and hovering above their summits in a huge mushroom-shaped cloud; to our left and west lay a wide-spreading lava-field, arms of which stretched amongst the neighbouring mountains like the troubled waters of a cindery ocean. Patches of black sand at intervals broke the continuity of this tract of lava, and culminated in a desert still farther to the north-east. Beyond, all the weird forms of fire-wrought mountains formed a fitting back-ground; their rude outlines rendered still more uncouth and grim by the fierce storms of ages. A huge tongue of glaciers at this point swept down to a distance of some ten miles beyond its most northern limit, as represented upon the map published by Olsen in 1844, from a survey made by Gunnlaugsson, in 1835. I here caught sight of Snæfell; and, upon taking its bearings with the smoking mountains, which were evidently the Dyngjufjöll, I found that instead of being at Querkfjall, which was the point I had intended to strike, we were upon the east side of Kistufell, about ten miles too much to the west. What astonished us most was (granted that we were at the east side of Kistufell) that we could see nothing of the Jökulsá-á-fjöllum, which river, upon Olsen’s map, rises at the foot of Kistufell; besides, upon his map the Jökull ends at Kistufell, while here a huge glacier extended east and north-east as far as the eye could reach, though exactly to our north and north-west it terminated abruptly, and only an insignificant river flowed to the north. We here abandoned our sleigh and snow-shoes which had served us so well, and whatever we no longer required, and, making everything into packs, continued our descent over huge piles of moraine, which doubtless covered glacial ice, buttresses and points of which here and there protruded. Having slidden down several steep slopes of snow, which had collected in all the hollows, affording us ready means of descent, we found ourselves at the height of 3,850 feet, in the bed of what evidently had been a large river, though now only an insignificant stream.