Frederick W.W. Howell, Icelandic Pictures Drawn With Pen And Pencil (1893)

An hour later we anchored off Húsavik, the house-bay of Garthar Svavarson, where a few lights twinkled through the gloom, from the trading-station, which here lies on a shelf, some distance above high water. It is the starting-point for Mývatn, and for the Dettifoss, the Tumbling Force, the grandest fall in Iceland, and probably, for height and size combined, the finest too in Europe.

Eastward from Húsavik lies a tract of peat-bog, and then a stony desert, but in a few miles a very ancient lava bed is reached, so far disintegrated that a dwarf birch forest has sprung up and thriven, scenting the air deliciously, and forming the resort of innumerable red-winged thrushes, who chirped and fluttered through the low branches in all directions. At intervals are little cracks which intersect the lava; some of them six feet wide and thirty feet deep, still hiding drifts of last year's snow, and crossed by natural stone bridges, like miniature crevasses. They doubtless owe their origin to contraction of the cooling rock.

The first day's march ends at the farm of Ás, near the great Jökulsá i Axarfirthi, a kind of Icelandic Nile, which, draining the northern glaciers of the Vatna Jökull, unites its turbid feeders, and hurries off to the Axefirth, from which it takes its name, in a stream whose total length is one hundred and twenty miles, during the later sixty-five of which it receives not a single tributary worth the name. It is this noble river which forms the Dettifoss. Turning southward at Ás, the track leads through another birch and heather wood, and after an hour descends to the level of the water. The scenery here is really grand – a wild, weird spot that would charm an artist. Between us and the river rose almost as it were from the very bed of the rushing torrent, the Hljóthaklettar (sounding, or echoing cliffs), a nest of prehistoric craters, which have poured out alternately lava and stones, and ashes. The cliffs rise to a height of about two hundred feet perpendicularly, and present a wall-like appearance. The erosion of some of the softer parts has well exposed the contorted and picturesque forms of the interjacent lava.

In another half-hour the farm of Svínadalr, a convenient halfway-house, is reached. Two or three miles above it, the river runs through a fine gorge, two hundred and fifty feet in depth, and about as far beyond the gorge a rising cloud of curling mist-wreaths proclaims the presence of the waterfall. Passing at first a basalt ledge, the flood breaks up into rapids, and dashes on to a spot where a rift in the lava has split its bed into a vast ravine, one hundred and eighty feet in perpendicular depth and five hundred feet across. Into this V shaped cleft, the already milk-white river hurls itself with a deafening roar, in a sheet four hundred yards in width. Midway some knobs of basalt project, and the wild rebound of the falling mass flings sheets of shattered foam into the awful sweep of the plunging flood, till the whole resembles a lamb's-wool fleece depending from the crag. And this is set in the jaws of the black abyss, where nothing detracts from the startling but truly Icelandic contrast. Yet, however fine in its summer guise, it must surpass itself when, in spring time, with a greater width by far, the mad career of huge blocks of ice hustling each other over the brink, must form an almost appallingly grand scene, a continuous avalanche and a waterfall combined.

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