We turned the ponies over to Johannes who took them to the pasture upon the moorland above the rift. It was only eleven in the morning and we had ridden but an hour yet we decided to spend the day in a further examination of this historic spot. The time allotted proved inadequate and a year later, on our return from the north, we passed an entire day here. Less than half a dozen people were stopping at the _Valhöll_. We were assigned a room like a beach bath house with two bunks, one above the other as in a steamer. We did not know till the next summer that this hotel had first, second and third class lodgings. It was the only place in Iceland where we ever found any distinction. On our second summer we had first class accommodations, which meant a large comfortable room with a regulation bed and the meals served privately in the adjoining room in place of on a bench in the large hall. Immediately we set out to explore the place. A mist was creeping in from the lake and down from the mountains. This soon developed into a “Scotch mist” which is an easy falling rain. We went to the _Öxerá_, explored the deep rift between the walls, which in places has been fenced off for sheep cotes. We climbed the wall to the top of the falls, peered down into the numerous fissures and were astonished to find snow at the bottom of one of them. It is a narrow chasm, very deep and the sun can not reach the bottom. We followed the wall eastward for two miles where we found a place to descend into the plain. On the return we wandered among the crevasses, dodging blocks of lava and jumping the narrow rifts where down a hundred feet the water glimmered. We returned in the rain for our mid-afternoon meal which consisted of broiled trout from the lake. It rained vigorously and we devoted some time to the neglected notebooks, also to an examination of the guest book. They do not use registers, simply a book in which the parting guest writes his name and any comments he chooses. There is an old Icelandic proverb which runs as follows,— _Island er hin besta land sem sól skina uppi_. Iceland is the best land on which the sun comes up (shines). This was quoted over one of the signatures. A little later some one had written an addition in German,—“_and the rain rains_.”