Number in series 26; Year of publication 1932 - Fell and Rock ...

128 THE FELL AND ROCK CLIMBING CLUB JOURNALthe stone debris. Climbing on a pile of boulders, one sees closeat hand the river, but not a vestige of green on its banks. Thecolour of soap-suds, it ambles between banks of the same colourfrom nowhere, by way of nowhere in particular, to the empty,blue, sunny Arctic Ocean, receiving no tributary above groundin the last sixty-five miles of its course. Scrambling amongsand-floored mazes of rectangular boulders, we come in anothertwenty minutes to the great fall. This is, in pattern, just likeother Iceland waterfalls—or rather, it is one of the two alternativetypes which there are here. Everything in the scenery ofthis land is clear-cut and hard, as if on the morrow of Creation.Hills have vertical sides and flat tops or else are symmetricalcones. Only the lava keeps its feast of misrule, and even itswild disorder is only apparent in its details, not in the greatsweeping lines, glacier-like, of its flows. This river seems tohave little in the way of a valley, but suddenly it comes to adeep rift extending longitudinally up its bed, at once tumblesinto it and continues its course between perpendicular, symmetricalcliffs of three hundred feet or so. (In the other typeof waterfall, as one may describe it, there is a sudden transversestep of cliff, instead of a longitudinal one). All that remain ofthe half-conscious hopes with which one has been consolingoneself for hours are finally dashed. Not here the mysteriouscharm of damp mosses and ferns, of swirling bottle-green depthswith their dance of bubbles; none of that which, in other places,attaches to waterfalls a sentiment not to be accounted for bythe notion of so much mere water obeying gravity. No troths,I am sure, are plighted here. The opaque flood is not fit to drink :full of greyish clay and large grains of black sand, with pieces ofpumice-stone floating in it, like dirty bath-water. A carpet,consisting exclusively of dandelions and yarrow, oddly clothes inplaces the black sand on top of the cliffs. At one place whichit is possible to reach, the spray of the fall accumulates into arivulet, where the wafer is slightly more drinkable than in themain river. I come across two or three old food-tins, verymuch rusted. Is it a month, or a season, since the last humanbeing was here, or have whole years passed without intrusion ?It is time to be off. Leading the horses with difficulty up theslopes of deep black sand and through the rocky gates above theriver, we emerge at last on the unbroken heath. Hours pass,