Haust

Hraunfossar is not one waterfall but hundreds. For almost a kilometre, spring water seeps out from beneath the Hallmundarhraun lava field — rain and meltwater that vanished into the rock long ago — and pours through the black wall into the glacial river Hvítá.

For a few weeks each year the slope above the falls changes colour. The dwarf birch goes copper, the blueberry and bearberry turn a red so deep it looks lit from inside, and the moss stays stubbornly green. Icelanders have one short word for this season: haust.

This was made on the fifth of October, at twenty to seven in the evening, facing the main wall of the falls in low, even light. The colour is kept close to what the eye saw — the whole palette of an Icelandic autumn running along the top of the rock.