of people regard with the greatest horror.
Although I had been informed by Icelanders
of respectability, who had visited this mountain,
that I should see nothing remarkable
upon it, but what I had seen elsewhere, still
I felt a great mortification at the refusal of
the guides to accompany m e ; because, next
they, instead of imprisoning their damned in the volcanoes,
consign them to the boiling fountains; upon
which subject Ksempfer has the following curious remarks
:—“ The monks of this place (Simabara) have
given peculiar names to each of the hot-springs, arising
in the neighborhood, borrowed from their quality, from
the nature of the froth at tt>p, or the sediment at bottom,
and from the noise they make as they come out
of the ground; and they have assigned them as purgatories
for several sorts of tradesmen and handicraftsmen,
whose professions seem to bear some relation to any
of the qualities above mentioned. Thus, for instance,
they lodge the deceitful beer and sackibrewers at the
bottom of a deep muddy spring; the cooks and pastrycooks
in another, which is remarkable for its white
froth 5 wranglers and quarrelsome persons in another,
which rushes out of the ground with a frightful murmuring
noise; and so on. After this manner, imposing
upon the blind and superstitious vulgar, they
squeeze money out of them, making them believe that
by their prayers and intercession they may be delivered
from their places of torment after death.”—History of
Japan, vol. i. p. 106.
to visiting the hot-springs, the opportunity
of climbing Hecla waà my grand object in
Iceland. At first, I thought of waiting a
few days for better weather, but the continuance
of the rain, and the little prospect
there was of its clearing up induced me,
before the evening, to determine upon departing
for Reikevig on the morrow ; especially
as the fortnight, the time allowed me
previously to the sailing of the Margaret
and Anne, was within three or four days
of its expiration. However, I left it with
somewhat the less regret, from hoping it
would be in my power to revisit the country
at a future time, under more fortunate
auspices. I have before mentioned that the
bishop’s see had been removed from Skal-
holt to Reikevig: at the same time the
cathedral, also, was pulled down, and a new
and very neat wooden church erectèd in its
stead. Our fair hostess accompanied us
to this building, which, however, contains
none of those reliques of antiquity * that
* These were, at the time when Olafsen and Povelsen
wrote their history (about 1760) , two ancient altar-
pieces, and a bishop’s staff (bâton d’Evêque), of which
the upper part was brass, richly gilt. There was, like