[Visit to Iceland by Ida Pfeiffer]@TWC D-Link book
Visit to Iceland

CHAPTER VI
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This time also the outer basin was entirely emptied, and the inner one to a depth of six or seven feet.

I could therefore again descend into the basin, and bid farewell to the Geyser at the very brink of the crater, which, of course, I did.
I had now been three nights and two days in the immediate vicinity of the Geyser, and had witnessed five eruptions, of which two were of the most considerable that had ever been known.

But I can assure my readers that I did not find every thing as I had anticipated it according to the descriptions and accounts I had read.

I never heard a greater noise than I have mentioned, and never felt any trembling of the earth, although I paid the greatest attention to every little circumstance, and held my head to the ground during an eruption.
It is singular how many people repeat every thing they hear from others--how some, with an over-excited imagination, seem to see, hear, and feel things which do not exist; and how others, again, tell the most unblushing falsehoods.

I met an example of this in Reikjavik, in the house of the apothecary Moller, in the person of an officer of a French frigate, who asserted that he had "ridden to the very edge of the crater of Mount Vesuvius." He probably did not anticipate meeting any one in Reikjavik who had also been to the crater of Vesuvius.


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