eaten raw, with the addition of butter, which,
after the whey has been expressed, is packed
down in chests, and kept for several years.
Their drink is either water, or sour milk, or
whey, and sometimes, but rarely, new milk
from their cows or ewes. Skiur, which is
thick curd, may also be reckoned a common
article of food: this they prefer after it has
acquired a sour, and even a rancid, taste.;
though, when fresh, or when it has attained
only a slight degree of acidity, and is eaten
with cream and sugar, it is really an enviable
article of luxury. The country immediately
about Reikevig, and, indeed, for twenty or
thirty miles from it, is ugly, barren, and
scarcely to be called hilly. An extensive
fresh-water lake comes close up to the back
part of the town, but is on every other side,
except that nearest the town, surrounded by
bog, with here and there a piece of rock
interspersed. Not a tree or shrub is any
where to be seen, and all attempts that have
been made in the most sheltered parts of the
place to cultivate firs and other hardy trees,
have universally failed, as have those which
have been made for the cultivation of corn.
This lake empties itself into the sea by a
KEIKEVIG. 35
small stream which runs by the side of the
town, in a course of not more than a few
hundred yards. Towards the east side of the
lake, on a gentle elevation, where a tolerably
rich herbage is produced, a prodigious number
of great pieces of rock are scattered about,
in the utmost disorder: some of them are of
vast size, three or four times the height of a
man, and about as wide as they are high;
yet there is no mountain in the neighborhood
from which they could have rolled;
tior could I find any cavities near the place
on which they stood, that would render it
probable they were thrown up by an earthquake;
neither do they appear, just in that
spot, to have undergone the operation of fire,
although some rocks, close by, have evidently
been in a state of fusion. On the shore, in
several places near the town, are many rudely
formed basaltic columns, standing close
together, in a perpendicular direction, some
from one to two and three feet in diameter:
they are obscurely angular, and, on the top,
are generally either concave or convex.
They appeared to me exactly of the same
nature as those of Staffa, and are found, also,
«m many of the islands near Reikevig. Being