Why do you choose Iceland for a vacation? I would go to a more interesting place, if I were you.

This question has been asked so many times and similar comments have followed so often before I could answer the question that I write my answer here, as an inducement to you, who can not take the long journey with me literally, to follow me in imagination through these pages and live with me for a few brief hours in that far off land of fascination.

The people interest me. The country was settled, not by serf nor servant. The grand old warriors of the viking period, who overran in quick succession the British Isles, ravaged the coast of France, swept through the Mediterranean and even penetrated to Constantinople, and wherever they went subdued and triumphed,—these are the men who, once the lords and petty kings of ancient Norway, scorning to bend the knee to Harald, chose unknown dangers in a strange and distant land, and going there sat down amidst the frosts and volcanoes of Iceland to relate the story of their deeds. From this virile race are the modern Icelanders descended. They are a kindly, honest and hospitable race; kind to each other and to the stranger within their borders, hospitable with a hospitality which is almost unknown in our selfish race, honest beyond all question.

The literature fascinates me. The language, now dead in its ancient Norse valleys, is a living speech in Iceland. Its children read its ancient sagas, centuries upon centuries old, as understandingly as their weekly newspapers. It is just as if some long lost island of the Aegian still held in all its ancient purity the musical accent of the Homeric age, or, as if some forgotten valley in the Italian Alps resounded with the rhetoric of Cicero or vibrated to the tunes of Horace.

The scenery, the geology, has a charm unknown in other lands. It is a country fresh from the crucible of nature. Here one views a continent in the making, beholds the mighty upheavals from the nether abyss, sees how nature, as if ashamed of her rough work, planes with her league-long blades of ice the basaltic ridges and glassy peaks. The traveller beholds a country full of lakes and rivers, and waterfalls the largest in Europe, but a country without any system of mountain chains and drainage to conform to the laws laid down by the physiographer. Mountains there are in abundance and lofty ones, but scattered hither and yon at the strange caprice of Pluto. Rivers, both the delight and the vexation of the traveller, inspiring in the grandeur and unharnessed freedom of their mighty canyons, vexing when they obstruct his passage, and he must lift his hat in trust to swim their white currents or else forbear the distant shore. In stern defiance of obstacles the traveller journeys through a roadless country where a thousand years since the progenitors of his diminutive steed first bore their valiant masters. There are miles of meadows smiling in the lengthened summer day and freely sprinkled with a rich and beautiful flora; there are quaking bogs to cross and quicksands, where the judgment of his pony surpasses his rider’s wisdom; there are wastes of wind driven sand without a scrap of vegetation to enliven the scene; there are mountain ranges to be crossed, perhaps where no one ever pressed the lava; there are beautiful valleys, rich with flocks and herds and alive with horses; there are areas of smoking lands, ill-smelling and sizzling fumaroles, boiling springs and blue-black mud cauldrons which vomit their horrid contents with a sickening gasp; lakes and ponds innumerable, where live unmolested a myriad waterfowl, where flowers bloom in a profusion often rare in more southern climes.

The homes are simple, humble and pastoral. An ancient house of turf and stone, an enclosed mowing patch, the sheep folds and the byre, a scanty garden where a few hardy vegetables rejoice in the long, long day. Even the endless day has its charm, the nearly continuous sunshine and the fleecy clouds in the bluest of blue skies, the lights and shadows on lake and mountain, the extreme clearness of the atmosphere, clear to the point of great deception to the inexperienced,—the colors, I did not forget them, nor will one having seen the richest of nature’s colors in these grand old volcanic piles with streaks of emerald and patches of brown, gray, yellow, red and crimson all washed and blended with the fan-like brush of melting snow, ever forget.

Why do I go to Iceland? Because the people appeal, the old stories of heroic deeds stir the sluggish blood of city life, and the thought of being foot-loose and care-free throughout its lingering summer day to roam at will its mountain vales and smiling meadows impels me.