Just up the valley from Gunnar’s house, on the ancient road to the South, yet another Icelandic fence demonstrates the Icelandic idea that a fence is a kind of net. You cast it when there is something to catch.
Sturluflöt, Villingadalur
Otherwise, it’s likely to be tangled up on the deck. Sometimes, I know, it’s hard to remember that the island is not a boat!
Sure, you can go spelunking in a cave and see a few columns of stone, but nothing beats a bit of sinkholing in April.
There are mysterious worlds just under the ice.
They only last few a few weeks.
Like viewing fall leaves or spring plum blossoms, really.
Just as beautiful, too.
Aw shucks, it’s May. You’re too late!
But the magic will come again next year!
Well, first off, Hengifoss is cool because to get there you have to walk at the top of this 80 metre high cliff, and you don’t see it, which is good.
And then you get to spend a couple hours, and finally you get to walk up the river.
You never reach the falls.
Distant views are good, though.
And a bit of dilly-dallying along the way.
And the sandstone, like, that’s cool, too.
And, well, this stuff:
Not to mention a bit of cooked seabed. Very shiny!
You’ll never get to the falls, though. Here, let me show you why:
Sinkholes! Worth a peek. All this ice is hollow like this. Tricky.
And not just that. No path to the left:
No path to the right:
The whole time, the falls are calling out with the sound of artillery going off as boulders are bonking down off the cliffs. You can’t get close to the cliffs or the water, but who cares.
You can just sit around waiting for the sun to get out from behind a cloud.
Definitely that. There is, you see, a mystery here, and I don’t just mean how gorgeous these falls really are, but, well, dragon blood:
And the best of all is you don’t get to the falls. That’s key. The cliff along the way plays a part in this. That’s it in shadow at the left of the image below. 
Here, maybe the following image will make it clear. The water doesn’t matter, except to focus your body and your eye. The mountain makes a space, and in that space water has no floor. It falls straight towards the centre of the Earth.
And you are in that space, falling with the water. You are in the centre of the Earth.
You can’t go further because you are as far as anyone can go. In the heart.
Following the Old Norse prototypes that long ago divided Iceland into the quadrants of a compass (Still used by the Icelandic Government’s tourism promotion board to label the country as West, North, East and, South Iceland [and don’t you dare travel around the country in the other direction; it only works poorly]), the Icelandic Cross is not divided into two axes, the vertical Heaven axis and the horizontal Earth axis, meeting at the heart, or Christ, but into four quadrants, blending the living and the dead with the action of the mind. It’s why Lazarus is so popular as a figure on Icelandic altars (Christ raised him from the dead, maggots and all), and why the Valþfjófstaðurkirkja looks like this, drawing its graveyard deep into thought.
The pre-Christian rowan trees of the graveyard are welcome as well.
Public access to beautiful things in Iceland, including stunning waterfalls like Hengifoss…
…is privately maintained and crosses private land at private expense.
The Way Back from the Falls is a Great Journey Too
So if the trail is muddy, give thanks. It was given to you as a gift. To be respectful, stay on it.
It’s a way of giving thanks and preparing the way for the next traveller.
Such suspense!
The one on the right is just fooling. No grass yet.
In Iceland, you look at the flow of life through a subconscious mind of ice from beyond the edge of the world, or …
…in Iceland, you look at the flow of the mind through a (melting and freezing) barrier of ice from beyond the edge of the world.
One could easily think about lesser things.
~
Bessasstaðaá
It grows well on glass.
And in the air.
And in the trees.
Also in mounded bits of purslane!
A true Icelandic Christian iconography would be rather unique!
As we can see here on Hverfisgata In Reykjavik, they’re all ghosts stories and the Icelanders are the ghosts within books their parents read, or they read when they were young themselves.
Charming.
As you can see, the relationships between technology, Icelanders, and time is haunting and complex. It’s a language in and of itself.
Who else do you know who lives so deeply within books that they have a transit system within them?
Reykjavik: always worth a read!
Old Reykjavik Gives a Norse Black Magic Curse to the New One at Sunrise
A Farm in Iceland 
