68 THE FOREST LANDS OF NORTHERN RUSSIA. 
‘six hundred yards of cataract in its various phases of 
sheer fall, boiling cauldron, wave and eddy and rapid, with 
the spray flying over us in clouds hurled up forty feet into 
the rainbow-sprinkled air from where the huge waves are 
breaking in thunder on the ink-black cliffs below us, we 
find no difficulty in realising that the grandest fall in- 
Europe is before us. The river is about 150 yards across 
above the crest of the first fall, when at high flood, after 
the melting of the snows, and some thirty feet in depth; 
but now, in early autumn, its volume is much reduced, 
and huge black rocks divide it into three separate streams 
at the lip. Some idea of the stupendous rush of waters 
may be judged from the fact that this superb river falls 
250 feet in the course of six hundred yards. Immediately 
below the first fall of forty feet is an inaccessible islet, 
covered with pines and birches, the leaves of which 
quiver with the concussion of the falling waters, just as 
those of the shrubs on Luna Island, hanging on the brink 
of Niagara, are ever tremulous. 
‘So indescribably grand is Njommelsaska, that it is with 
the utmost reluctance that we turn our backs upon its 
glories, and wend our way back to Ligga through the 
silent forest, whence a third long day’s walk brings us to 
Jokkmokk.’ 
This, however, though within woody Lapland, lies far to 
‘the west of the line which divides Scandinavian Lapland 
from Russian Lapland. 
The whole of woody Lapland is so level that scarcely 
one of the mountains rises higher than 213 feet above the 
neighbouring plains, and in none of the first three zones is 
the height above the level of the sea considerable, but a 
few high mountains there are. And the Lapland Alps 
have an altitude such that no part is less than 2000 feet - 
above the level of the sea, 
The fifth region, the higher Alpine region, extends 
along the north side of Lapland, varying in breadth as it 
