The true falls can not be photographed. The triangular plot upon which we have been standing is within the canyon and the walls rise above us to the height of about two hundred feet. Above us the palisaded buttresses, drenched with spray, glisten in the morning sun and hanging over the chasm frown upon the river below as if threatening to prevent its escape. The imprisoned waters boil and foam in their mad contention with the walls ragingly impatient of their restriction, anxious to escape to the rural calmness of the southern plains. So mighty is the mass of water, so narrow are the depths into which it hurls itself that one must believe that subterranean passages exist or the lava rift would fill and quickly choke itself to overflowing. It is possible that these hidden rifts, results of earthquakes, supply the water for the hot springs far away. Perhaps the ramifications of great _Geysir’s_ underground system reach even to the foot of this canyon, even as one end of the drinking horn, out of which _Thor_ drank in the halls of _Utgard-Loki_, was placed in the sea, so that _Thor_ lost his wager by being unable to empty the horn at a single draught. Grim, grand and glorious is the Foss, surpassing Niagara in scenic environment. Under suitable conditions Niagara has its well-known rainbow, but _Gullfoss_ has several of them arching the waters one above the other in the dense volume of spray that is hurled two hundred and fifty feet above the surface of the stream. If the fabled pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow arch is to be obtained anywhere, it must be sought for in this place, for within the walls of the upper canyon the rainbows end. One may pass through them and even stand at the springing of the prismatic arch if he is willing to take the drenching of the down-pouring floods of spray, like sheets of water in a New England thunder storm. Grand as is the _Gullfoss_, its setting is even more impressive. Above the plain _Láng Jökull_ stretches forty miles across the horizon, lifting its unexplored surface of adamantine ice high in air, a perpetual challenge to him who would search the unknown. At its base and near at hand _Hvitávatn_, White-River-Lake, the source of the river, carries a fleet of icebergs upon its sun-lit surface. In the perpetual sunlight of Iceland’s summer months this vast icefield discharges constant floods down its cliffs. Hence the _Hvitá_ starts upon its turbulent course to the sea a full-grown river laden with glacial clay. Towards the east the peaks of _Kerlingafjáll_, Old-Woman-Peaks, arrest the eye, around whose skirts hot springs are scattered sending up a mass of vapor like incense to the heroic gods of Scandinavian mythology.