Mrs. Disney Leith, Peeps At Many Lands: Iceland (1908), pp. 12-13.
When you first see Iceland from the steamer that takes you there, it is usually a little bit of a high mountain, the Vatna Jöku1, that appears to you as if in the clouds. The word "jökull" means a glacier or ice-field, where the snow never melts. Many of the jökulls are volcanoes as well. Is it not curious to think of fiery pits underneath all that cold, unmelting snow and ice? Yet many of the volcanoes have erupted in the past, and desolated all the country around for miles and miles. Very few of them are still active.

As you steam along, the beautiful island gradually opens out, and you see more and more ice-fields: the Myrdals, a great smooth white mountain; the Eyjafell, which runs far out to sea; and presently you see Hekla, usually with some snow on it; which last is the best-known and latest active volcano here, and is often the only name that English people know in Iceland. Before landing we come to some pretty rocky islands called the Westmanns. Only one is inhabited. If the boat stops, as it usually does, for mails, you have a chance to land on the island, or to visit in a small boat a wonderful cave in the rocks, quite high and deep. The islands swarm with puffins, which fly out screaming if they are disturbed.

J. Ross Browne, The Land of Thor (1867), p. 426.
It would be difficult to conceive of anything more impressive than this first view of the land of snow and fire. A low stretch of black boggy coast to the right; dark cliffs of lava in front; far in the background, range after range of bleak, snow-capped mountains, the fiery Jokuls dimly visible through drifting masses of fog; to the left a broken wall of red, black, and blue rocks, weird and surf-beaten, stretching as far as the eye could reach -- this was Iceland! All along the grim rifted coast the dread marks of fire, and flood, and desolation were visible. Detached masses of lava, gnarled and scraggy like huge clinkers, seemed tossed out into the sea; towers, buttresses, and battlements, shaped by the very elements of destruction, reared their stern crests against the waves; glaciers lay glittering upon the blackened slopes behind; and foaming torrents of snow-water burst through the rifted crags in front, and mingled their rage with the wild rage of the surf. All was battle, and ruin, and desolation.

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