Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/89

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A TRIP AROUND ICELAND
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Palagonite, between Laganvatn and Geyser.

these latter are most fascinating. The larger, deeper pools are near the "hotel," and the Geyser itself is the center of a mound of sinter, about a stone's throw away. It forms a large circular pool, whose floor shelves off to a wide descending pipe, into which one eagerly strains one's eyes for a possible glimpse at the infernal machinery which works them all. It keeps its opaline eye staring wide open, sheds a few tears from time to time, which pour in little cascades down the slant outer sides, but never, by any chance rewards the tired spectator with an explosion. Still Geyser is an exciting sort of place, and what its bigger brother fails to do a much smaller fountain meritoriously endeavors to perform. In the morning and afternoon this industrious steam-pipe gets to work, and shoots up a column some fifteen to twenty feet high, and what is missed in magnitude is made up in the number and continuity of its emissions. It makes a very commendable restitution for the patience lost on its big somnolent companion. There is a very wide and profuse deposit of geyserite at this place which may extend a mile or so outward to the south from the hills north of the "hotel." Above the geyser plain on the hillside, about one hundred