s to the
brink of gulfs whose mysteries we had no desire to explore. After we had
advanced nearly two miles in this manner, ascending rapidly all the
time, a hollow reverberation, and a glimpse of profounder abysses ahead,
revealed the neighbourhood of the Riukan. All at once patches of lurid
gloom appeared through the openings of the birch thicket we were
threading, and we came abruptly upon the brink of the great chasm into
which the river falls.

The Riukan lay before us, a miracle of sprayey splendour, an apparition
of unearthly loveliness, set in a framework of darkness and terror
befitting the jaws of hell. Before us, so high against the sky as to
shut out the colours of sunset, rose the top of the valley--the level of
the Hardanger table land, on which, a short distance further, lies the
Mios-Vand, a lovely lake, in which the Maan Elv is born. The river first
comes into sight a mass of boiling foam, shooting around the corner of a
line of black cliffs which are rent for its passage, curves to the right
as it descends, and then drops in a single fall of 500 feet in a hollow
caldron of bare black rock. The water is already foam as it leaps from
the summit; and the successive waves, as they are whirled into the air,
and feel the gusts which for ever revolve around the abyss, drop into
beaded fringes in falling, and go fluttering down like scarfs of the
richest lace. It is not water, but the spirit of water. The bottom is
lost in a shifting snowy film, with starry rays of foam radiating from
its heart, below which, as the clouds shifts, break momentary gleams of
perfect emerald light. What fairy bowers of some Northern Undine are
suggested in those sudden flashes of silver and green! In that dim
profound, which human eye can but partially explore, in which human foot
shall never be set, what secret wonders may still lie hidden! And around
this vision of perfect loveliness, rise the awful walls wet with spray
which never dries, and crossed by ledges of dazzling turf, from the gulf
so far below our feet, until, still further above our heads, they lift
their irregular cornices against the sky.

I do not think I am extravagant when I say that the Riukan Foss is the
most beautiful cataract in the world. I looked upon it with that
involuntary suspension of the breath and quickening of the pulse, which
is the surest recognition of beauty. The whole scene, with its breadth
and grandeur of form, and its superb gloom of colou