Bidding farewell to Knut, who waited a few minutes while I made a rough sketch of himself and his horse, we went on climbing. Hitherto the height of the mountains around had served to keep out the sun’s rays; but now our altitude was such, that they no longer served as a parasol, and as we emerged from the shadow into the broiling glare, the labour became proportionately greater. But we soon reach the top of the ascent, and open upon a bleak moor, flagged at intervals with flattish stones.
To the north rose a roundish mountain, clad with snow. This is Iökeln, 5700 feet high, called by the natives Yuklin. Between us and it, at the distance of about a mile across the moor, rose a thin, perpendicular spire of smoke, which might have been taken for the reek of a gipsy campfire.
“That’s Vöring,” said the guide, stuffing a quantity of blue and cloud berries into his mouth. “We shall have good weather; you should see Vöring when the weather is going to be bad—doesn’t he smoke then?”
I observed that all the people here talked thus of the Fall, assigning a sort of personality to the monster, as if it was something more than a mere body of water.
“And here we are at Vöring,” said the guide, after we had steeple-chased straight across the swamp to the shadowy spire. As he said this, he pointed down into an abyss, from which proceeded dull-sounding thunderings.
I found we were standing on the verge of a portentous crater, nine hundred feet deep, into which springs, at one desperate bound, the frantic water-spirit. The guide’s phlegmatic appearance at this moment was a striking contrast to the excitement of Paddy this summer, when he was showing me the organ-pipes of the Giant’s Causeway, sounding with the winds of the Atlantic.
“This, yer honner, is allowed by all thravellers to be the most wonderfullest scane in the whole world. There’s nothing to be found like it at all at all. Many professors have told me so.”
Straight opposite to us the cliff rose two or three hundred feet higher, and shot down another stream of no mean volume. But it was the contact of the Vöring with the black pit-bottom that I desired to see. This, however, is no easy matter. At length I fixed on what appeared to be the best spot, and requesting the man to gripe my hand tight, I craned over as far as I could, and got a view of the whole monster at once. Did not he writhe, and dart, and foam, and roar like some hideous projectile blazing across the dark sky at night. Such a sight I shall never behold again. It was truly terrific. It was well that the guide held me fast, for a strange feeling, such as Byron describes, as if of wishing to jump overboard, came over me in spite of myself.
But, after all, the Vöring Foss is a disappointment. You can’t see it properly. A capital defect. One adventurous Englishman, I understand, did manage by making a detour, to descend the cliff, and actually launched an India-rubber boat—what odd fellows Englishmen are—on the infernal surge below. A man who was with him told me he held the boat tight by a rope, while the Briton paddled over the pool. Arrived there, without looking at the stupendous column which rose from where he was to the clouds, or rather did vice versá, he pulled out of his pocket a small pot of white paint, and forthwith commenced painting his initials on the rock, to prove, as he said, that he had been there.