Iceland: Horseback tours in saga land. W. S. C. Russell
the Author in Full Dress of the Faroese,
ICELAND
CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL
Atossa.—And who is set over them as a shepherd of the flock, and is master of the army?
Chorus.—They call themselves the slaves of no man, nor the subjects either.
—Aeschylus.
Historically, Iceland is unique. Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Mexico—each has a prehistoric period of human habitation, when man loved and hated, and competed with the brutes for existence. He fashioned his instruments from stone and made self-preservation his first and only law. A sturdy race, little removed from the highest brutes, filled with animal vigor and endowed with brute passions, held all known lands in prehistoric time. Step by step, cycle upon cycle, brute force submitted to reason; culture and refinement, mental acquisition and spiritual attainment characterized an evolutionary race of human beings in which each developing cycle was founded upon the decadence of the prehistoric.
Not so with Iceland. A myriad centuries the Atlantic had rolled its billows against these basalt cliffs, the Arctic packed its ice upon these shores, the beetling mountains cast their rugged outlines upon the quiet fiords, the great Plutonic candles flamed in the Arctic air and guttered the land again and again with scorching streams of molten rock. The seal basked in the sunshine of the lengthened summer, the salmon sported in the glacial streams and millions of birds congregated on the lofty cliffs. All life was blissfully ignorant of its great enemy, man.
There