Counting the Eruptions

It’s a climb — forty-five minutes up a stepped path from the lake, into a wind coming straight down the valley — and for most of it the falls are hidden. Then the gorge turns and there it is at the head of it, a single white line dropping a hundred and twenty-eight metres into a bowl.

What everybody photographs, though, is the wall. The cliff Hengifoss falls into is layered like a section drawing: dark grey basalt, then a band of vivid red, then more basalt, then red again, all the way up. The red is clay — soil that formed on top of a lava flow during a long enough gap that plants got going and the rock weathered, before the next eruption came over and sealed it. Every one of those stripes is a period of quiet.

The cliff is a list. Each red line is a few thousand years in which nothing happened.

There’s a second waterfall on the way up, Litlanesfoss, dropping through a colonnade of basalt columns that are taller and more regular than the ones at Svartifoss — worth the stop on the way back down, when your legs have an opinion about it.

On the walk out I kept looking at the riverbed instead: a wide braid of grey stones with a thin blue thread wandering through it, and the whole valley going gold and rust. Late September in the east is a colour I hadn’t expected from Iceland at all.