Aspects of Iceland
A wartime visit to Geysir and Gullfoss

Auther: Gerrit Marks, Mount Airy, MD

During the British occupation of Iceland during World War II, a soldier identified only as “P.N. W-T” published an account of his visit to Geysir and Gullfoss, while on leave, accompanied by five companions. His story was published in four installments in The Midnight Sun (November 2-23, 1940), a four-page weekly edited by the British Army chaplain, Canon John C.F. Hood. Although wartime censors allowed the publication to be mailed home to family in the United Kingdom and Canada, the identities of most contributors were secured for reasons of security. This soldier’s account reads like any peacetime travelogue, which goes to show that, even though he was in Iceland on a military mission, the marvels of Iceland’s nature offered some measure of relief from the cares of wartime. The author was obviously someone with a solid grounding in the natural sciences.

I
Have you seen Geysir spout?

Or Gullfoss tumble and swirl roaring and throw out its rainbow?

If not, go at the first opportunity. The one as a remarkable phenomenon is the greatest in nature, the father of all other Geysirs; the other, a waterfall, also according to experts qualifies for a world title – for beauty.

I went with five others one Sunday in September. It was a cloudless day of sun. To be accurate, it was the fifteenth of September, the day before the golden plovers migrate from Iceland every year, and this day we saw thousands of them in the green fields near the coast and in the valleys, rubbing shoulders and eating and whispering confidentially with only little short flights a few inches above the ground, storing up energy for their enormous journey across the sea for the winter.

We swept past the ski-jump places at Kolviðarhóll, climbing, and curved down the vast cliff to the valley where Grýta with its hot springs and Kaldaðarnes lie, and spun on west into the lava country. Near Selfoss we saw the river Hvítá spreading out wide and white, a home of salmon; and we looked at it here, near its origin from the Langjökull glacier which, plunging over ledges in its leaping rocky highland path, forms Gullfoss the Golden Fall.

From this spot on we could see Hekla about twenty-five miles to the right shouldering up into the sky, its upper half painted with snow like icing poured on a Christmas pudding; and here on the way back, the visibility being clearer, we saw various glaciers standing up white and cloud-shrouded in the distance: Torfajökull, Tindafjallajökull, Mýrdalsjökull, and we even convinced ourselves we could see vast Vatnajökull, by far the biggest circumscribed glacier on the entire earth, though from there the distance would have been about sixty miles. These glaciers, though, were far off, like ghosts, but now, proceeding, we saw one in front of us much closer, and getting closer every moment, and there was nothing indefinite about this. Under the sun it stood out with an incredible dazzling whiteness. This was Langjökull – long indeed, fifty miles, and flat as a sea horizon – at first just glimpsed peeping white and straight above the Vs of the hills, but rising steadily as we approached until the irregular rock hills in front stood out against the snowy gleaming backcloth, a dramatic frieze of jagged fangs. We got the best view, this one described, from Gullfoss, where we were only about ten miles distant, and the imagination roamed like a giant skiing mightily over the immaculate wastes never trodden by human foot.

II
But before that we went to Geysir.

At a bridge over a lively tributary of the Hvítá, about 70 miles from Reykjavik, we forked left, passed two swans swimming in a lake, and then a few miles to the right saw steam rising at several places in a plain. Geysir!

“And look!” cried Mac in anxiety, “She’s spouting. We’re too late!”

For suddenly a jet of steam shot into the air and remained fizzing.

“Hurry for God’s sake” we shouted to our Icelandic driver who had no English. “It’s still going. We may not be too late. Hurry! Quick! Vite! What the hell’s Icelandic for hurry?”

But all was well; this was just a minor jet and not great Geysir at all, but since it was after one o’clock, we understood that would not be long. There was a single storied brick building, with a few cars round it, the hotel, so we left our car there and hurried across to where we saw a group of figures, and at many places the ground rang hollow under our feet. This was a plain several miles in extent; at this end near the hills, steam was rising from the earth in a dozen places or more, and grouped round a central mound there was this knot of figures. They were men of an infantry regiment and I knew the Officer.

“Hullo,” I said, “Are we in time?”

He grinned and indicated his men, “We’ve been sitting here half an hour already.”

“And soap? Has anyone put in any soap?”

“We put in twenty pounds.”

“Ah!” We smiled at one another in satisfaction. All was well. “And how long does it take after the soap,” I enquired.

One of the men replied drily, “Anything from ten minutes to five hours, they say.”

We stayed there a moment before exploring round about and took photographs. The mound was made of sulphur precipitate from the Geysir spout falling back and evaporating and was hard like stone. In the centre was the chimney going down to the bowels of the earth, now filled with water four feet below the brim, forming a circular hot pool of thirty feet diameter, green and mysterious, just now opalescent with the soap and fuming lazily with sulphurous steam. Although it is an open plain, the whole place had an eeriness as we walked about, now rumbling underfoot, here gurgling down an orifice punched in the flat earth, there hissing steam through a crevice, at other places forming hot green pools flush with the surface, cauldron boiling, and edged with a brittle sulphur crust. We climbed the near hills, where there are carved memorial stones of the three latest kings of Denmark, and then since nothing seemed to be happening, decided to have lunch at the hotel while we waited.

Mac and John had seats near the window, and we had just ordered beer when suddenly John leapt up, shouting, “She’s off! She’s off!”

I think we broke all records covering that two or three hundred yards over rough ground and slightly uphill, with me shouting, “Are you sure you’ve got the camera?” Everyone was running. The Colonel said he had never run so fast since the last war, and if the Geysir had been downhill, was sure he would never have been able to stop himself but would have tumbled exhausted right in.

She was heaving up as if a giant below was getting up energy for a great burst. First, the watchers said the temperature of the pool went up and then, with angry bubblings, the surface began to rise. They fled. When I saw it, the intermittent bubblings had reached heaves five and ten feet into the air, then the water overflowed the top all round, swishing down with a hiss of steam on to the dry ground.

And still it heaved. Whoomf! Whoomp! There was no wind and the water fell straight back.

It remained like this for about five minutes, heaving regularly, and we took photographs in case nothing else was going to happen and went closer until many of us were standing only a few yards from the edge. There must have been a hundred people there, civilians and soldiers, and one Officer alongside me near the edge had just turned his head and opened his mouth to say, “Well, if this is all that …” when startlingly, – Wh-i-i-r-r!!! Without warning it was in real action.

The Geysir! The Geysir!!

The prodigy of nature. The miracle that has astonished generations of crawling dull mortals for hundreds of years, that probably astonished the prehistoric mammoth lumbering in the icefields. Up and up it went, a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet, a rushing roaring column expelled from some subterranean avernus refracted white, auraed in a cloud of steam and gleaming in the sun.

III
Gullfoss, I found, elicited a different reaction from Geysir. The one inspires awe, it has an intellectual appeal because of the unusualness, the fierceness and, one might say, the primevalness of the manifestation; the other stirs the senses, it plucks the heart and amazes the brain because of its beauty, like a rich sunset or music.

We reached there after three, not having had time for a sit-down lunch after Geysir, but having had it while bumping along in the car. And we did bump. The superannuated boneshaker we had hired for a car that day had no springs, doors that did not open, grinding gears and a fearsomely churning engine, and we were lucky only to have had one blow-out for the tyres, bulged and grinned and gaped like some surrealistic figment of Salvador Dali, but nothing could spoil our day. From Geysir we retraced our way back to the fork, then came on across the bridge and over the lava fields. We said that there within a few miles was laid out to those who cared to read it the story of a million years of plant life, a sort of short H.G. Wells history of this earth. One lava field, bare, desolate and primeval, consisting of nothing but grotesque shapes and whorls and juts of stone, with no earth or life, suggested the first stage in the planet’s history when its molten crust was cooling into rock; the next showed the same field weathered, it might have been by a hundred thousand years of wind and rain and snow chemistry, crumbling a little with smaller debris filling up the crevices, but still grey and dead; the next showed the first touch of life, a lowly parasitic life, tiny grey lichen clinging closely to the stones, and now slightly green making for the first time its little chlorophyll from the sun’s rays; next subduing the stones still more, moss appears, spreading, and little hardy rock plants with miraculous tiny flowers; and these decay with death as the rock decays and both form earth, and so at last you see grass itself rooted and multiplying in flat acres.

We saw Gullfoss under ideal conditions. Most scenes in Iceland require cloud effects for their optimum beauty, but not so Gullfoss. All it asks is a clear sun because its rainbow is its special glory.

I have not space here to discuss the nature of glaciers, except this far: they are formed in arctic temperatures by the continual congealing of water vapour or rain so that, in certain arctic regions or on the heights of isolated glaciers, such as those in Iceland, there is, at times, almost continuous snowing. This snow settles, presses and compresses to a mountain of ice, and the perpetually growing weight spreads it at the bottom and moves it on. From the arctic north, the glaciers move southward and, reaching the sea, break off in icebergs; in the insulated mountain glaciers of Iceland, it is the same process: they settle at their base and spread outwards all round, either breaking off icebergs in lakes or melting as they advance on the lower ground to form the origins of rivers. Langjökull does both: the tributaries of several rivers running either north or south spring from its melting base at many points on its hundred mile circumference – (including several tributaries of the Hvítá in the south) – while at one place where Hvítárvatn – White River Lake – adjoins, icebergs break off and, floating in the lake, make sights of beauty. This beautiful lake in the uplands, ten miles above Gullfoss, is the main origin of the river and from here it runs sixty miles eagerly to the sea. Here are no leisured fields or woods to delay a river in murmuring contemplation, but a precipitous country of rocks and ledges and chasms through which it must rush and twist and swirl and leap headlong. Sometimes it speeds narrow in a deep gorge with rock walls a hundred feet above, then spreading wide and white it slithers babbling and curvetting down half a mile of mad rapids, now it plunges over a ledge and now another. Gullfoss – The Golden Fall – is the most important of these plunges.

IV
We had crossed several bridges over tributaries and for a while, on the right, had heard the main river growling in its canyon, then, topping a last rise, we saw the fall facing us. This from downstream is its fairest aspect. It is not a simple fall, a thud like Niagara, or Victoria, or huge Dettifoss, “The Tumbling Fall,” in the north – the greatest fall in Iceland and, after these two, the third in the world – but a double fall in an unusual fashion, and it is this unusualness, partly, which makes its remarkable beauty. On the highland above it runs shallow and wide, greenish white, a mass of flashing corrugations over the uneven bed like a million salmon jostling. Then comes the upper fall, not set transversely to the stream, but obliquely so the river takes a half-left turn falling down over the rocks in an irregular pretty cascade of about fifty feet. The middle section of the fall is a whirling race, a mad scrambling turn, because here on this brief level the water must again alter its course almost a complete circle to plunge on the right in a sheer thunderous drop to its chasm, where boiling and roaring with fury it throws up a vast spray of indignation and is borne off again at right angles – bringing it to its original direction – a hundred and fifty feet deep in its canyon with a continuing hoarse angry protest.

From the place of our first glimpse in the moving car we could see most of this, but not all; we could not see the foot of the fall nor its race in the canyon, so we drew up our car near the locked and empty wooden restaurant building on the brow of the land facing the fall, and walking to the right stood on the canyon’s edge. This is the spot from which most of the photographs of Gullfoss are taken, but no photograph or painting can produce the live, vivid, yet, from this distance, delicate beauty. There is the white of the falling water, the black of the rocks. There is green on the adjoining land, but beyond this no colour – we did not wait for the sunset – so that from here, with the untouched ruggedness of its setting, the spectacle had a quality of virginal pureness like Andromache chained to the rock. It is spiritual, it has a loveliness of its own, with the diversity of curves of the falling water and the veil of mist, it is exquisite in its unique difference from all other falls; but to tell the truth after saying that to ourselves, or thinking it, we could not find, from that distance, much else about Gullfoss. Why did people speak about it with that note which is only given to the thrilling? We were not yet ravished by Gullfoss.

We had not yet seen its rainbow.

We decided to walk down the bridle path alongside the canyon of the final plunge, which was wafted over by a gossamer of spray, and so come to a point of rock we could see between the two stages of the fall itself. So we walked down in single file getting closer to the size and noise, and with each step becoming more impressed. This was a fall indeed. What a noise! What power! We had to shout to be heard.

And then John, who was in front of me, did shout.

“The Rainbow!” he said, his face delighted, pointing to the right into the spray which he was just entering.

“Where?”

“Here! You can almost touch it.”

You could. Two steps further, coming abreast of the mist which rose from the churning chasm, I saw it, at this entering edge just one end of the bow coming across the chasm and meeting ground on the wet grass in the spray not three yards from our feet: red and green and blue. And each step we went, it was with us; each step along the chasm edge, looking across it where the mighty flood flung forward and down under our feet, looking across the swirling millrace to the higher fall beyond, now coming more and more side on and leaping down free and alive from left to right, – each step the rainbow followed, growing as the spray grew until it formed a full arch from the far corner of the millrace to our feet. Sometimes, with a thicker waft of spray, the rainbow would narrow, standing out vividly and defined, sharp red and orange and green and violet, as if it were a miraculous finite girder, and then, rarifying, it would widen to a diaphanous band of pastel. Then the far arch of the bow met the upper fall and the spray wafting out from it, left to right, struck by the fairy sun, became a hail of colour flung up and out, broadcast, unending, borne on a million flying motes from this miracle dancing source to the high opposing black bank. Now it was purple, now a streaming smoke of apple green, now a glory of orange, and now gold, gold, gold.

Someone who had seen it on a dull day asked me why it was called the Golden Fall. I shook my head in pity; it was impossible to explain in words, as I have found just now writing, so I said to him as I say to you: “Go and see it in the sun.”