A TRIP ABOUND ICELAND 



87 



The Bruaau on the way to Geyser. 



The climax was the Gullfoss. For half a century travelers who 

 have reached this waterfall have given it their enthusiastic esteem, and 

 as a " show card " for Iceland it's a winner. It is not so large, so 

 immense; it does not possess mere physical dimensions, but it is a 

 spectacle of astonishing beauty, and is so set in the loneliness of nature 

 as to produce an astonishingly strong and thrilling impression. You 

 come suddenly in view of it after the gallop over the sand plain, and 

 its roar, the distant confused movement of the water and the shooting 

 spires of spray fairly daunt you. Here the waters of the Hvitaau pour 

 over one palisade of rock about forty feet high, and turning a right- 

 angle tumble about one hundred feet into the whirling resounding 

 gulf of a narrow, deep canon that is cut southward between walls 

 about three hundred feet high, which again farther south become almost 

 one thousand feet in height. The upper fall is broken by intercepting 

 partitions of rock. The falls are in process of recession, and the 

 upper, by the more rapid removal of the possibly more easily disin- 

 tegrated middle bed of rock, has slipped away from its lower com- 

 panion. As the water boils and surges over the descending shelf 

 between the upper and lower falls, it makes a very turbulent display. 



