The Ice Museum (14 page)

Morris found a rough utopia: his bent was anti-modern; his tastes turned to lavish medieval scenes, knights on horseback, damsels with long tresses, and in Iceland he saluted a simple and archaic life. He savoured the small settlements, their low gabled sheds like grey tents, built on a rare patch of green in the desert, with sheep and cows grazing around. For Morris, it was an ‘Isle of Refuge,' the home of those ‘representatives, a little mingled with Irish blood, of the Gothic family of the great Germanic race.' A country very remarkable in aspect, he wrote, little more than a desert, yet the most romantic desert to look at: a huge volcanic mass still liable to eruptions of mud, ashes and lava. Anyone travelling there would be apt to hope, wrote Morris, if they knew nothing of Iceland's history, that its terrific and melancholy beauty might once have been illumined by a history worthy of its strangeness; nor would they hope in vain. The bizarre contours of the lava fields, the exploding glaciers, the mountains dripping fire, had brought forth a race of bold warriors: ‘the delightful freshness and independence of thought of the early settlers, the air of freedom which blows through them, their worship of courage, their utter unconventionality. ' Their heritage, he added, had been sustained to the present day. The modern-day Icelanders, as Morris found them, spoke the language of the earlier Gothic tribes, ‘almost intact,' and ‘the shepherd on the hill-side, the fisherman in the firth still chant the songs that preserve the religion of the Germanic race. . . .'

Onto the blank resonance of the valley, the cold greyness of the lake, Morris conjured a cast of Saga warriors. Under the shadow of Almannagjá, he imagined immense crowd scenes, with thousands of extras, Viking warriors lurking in every rift. Morris worked himself into a thrilling frenzy, gasping at the cracked earth and the rivers of fire, remembering old stories of Viking warriors. He saw cold blue hills and blackened rocks, and patterned the scenery with imaginary spectres, spilling Vikings, wraiths and eidolons onto the empty mountainsides. He saw a land unlike his own, bringing the consolations of difference—the empty plains, the wide-eyed innocent inhabitants, as Morris found them, living in their simple land. The hills and stark valleys of this Saga-land, scarcely changed since the Saga age.

In 1874, shortly after Burton and Morris had gone home, the new Icelandic Constitution was signed, giving the Icelanders some domestic autonomy, after years as a Danish colony. 1874 marked a thousand years, probably, since the founding of Iceland by the Norse sailors. A host of journalists appeared in Iceland, observing the events, feeding their domestic audience of Saga-fans with news of the liberation of Saga-land. The Icelanders chanted a celebratory verse:

 
We were once Thule, the people chanted, and we will be great again. Just look outside, at our weird country, they might have added; how could we not be great, with this extraordinary auto-mutating landscape, constantly creative, a Protean reverie—stretching and pirouetting into lava statues as far as the eye can see?

The placid waters of the lake stretched beneath, a great sheet of water with an island lying in the middle looking like a broken-down crater, great pointed hills on two sides of it, the heavy grey mountain of Armannsfell behind, and the lava lining the slopes to Skjaldbreiður. The spiky hills stood dark against the sky; the deep water was green like the cold sea. A soft wind blew across the lake, and a long line of mist drifted across the plain. I took a cup of coffee in the Valhalla Hotel. A woman served me, blonde, pale-eyed, setting the coffee down with a watery smile and then disappearing, apparently for ever. I sat in the nearly empty room, with a fire dying in the grate. A German couple sat a few tables away, hidden in the semi-darkness, murmuring a low commentary on the plain. The wind shook the windows. Outside, a van moved slowly across the muddy car park, driving into the misty evening. I watched it cross the valley and the glinting river, until it disappeared into the receding contours of the mountains.

 
 
The ring road in Iceland runs north towards the volcanic region of Mývatn, a place of blasted rocks and pastel plains, where the sun lingers through the night in the summer, shining a pale light across the scarred landscape. Through marshlands and craters the road runs, along the base of grey and purple mountains, past blue waterfalls cascading through gullies. Past the petrol stations and snack-bar villages, civilization pared down to essentials. The road turns to rubble at times; it passes through lush green valleys; it rises into grey mountains, past lunar slabs of rock in pastel shades. The mountains become multi-tone—the whiteness of the snow stark against the orange sand-cones and the dark ash slopes. At the coastal towns everything is coated in mist and the dull shapes of farms loom from the whiteness. The road runs past the silver waters of lakes, over the table mountains. When the mist falls away, there are rivers and a few slender firs, clinging to the rocks. There are hotels, surrounded by baroque basalt pillars. The mists swirl across the plains. When the light dwindles, patterns begin to emerge from the lava, the piles of rocks like stacked-up coals, the deep blue river carving a channel through the valley, the conical peaks jutting out of the uneven ground. The lowland plains are coated in grasses, scattered with boulders; the mountain slopes are delicate layers of ash rock, with snow dusting the higher peaks. All these cracked slopes stand with the clouds casting shadows across them, the empty road winding under them.

The landscape is transformed as the road reaches the north. The colours change from gentle greys and browns to the brilliant orange of the sulphur hills, the white of the snow on the peaks gleaming under the silver light. When the road reaches the volcanic centre of Mývatn—a lake blasted by past explosions, surrounded by thick fields of lava—the buses drop off their passengers, leaving them at the hotels and campsites. They are left in a volcanic plain, surrounded by enormous piles of ash and pools of water steaming in the twilight.

I arrive in Mývatn as the landscape fades under a star-swept sky. The bus grinds to a halt in Reykjahlið, the main town at Mývatn, a tiny place of a few houses and hotels and campsites, deluged on all sides by greying lava rocks. Low mountains of sand and ash rise around the town, their colours dull in the twilight. The hotels are all full, so I walk to a campsite on a pile of lava, trying to escape the midges that hang around the edges of the lake. The clouds are thick and black by the time I have put the tent up, and the stars have been obscured. I sit for a while on the lower slopes of one of the hills, looking out at the green islands looming from the rain-spotted waters. There's a busload of French tourists setting up camp close by, and the smells of their cooking make me ravenously hungry as I sit in the tent, staring at the view. Mývatn is a fire-blasted place of black rocks and steaming sulphur pools, with the volcano of Krafla lurking to the east. At 3 A.M., I am woken by the wind lashing the sides of the tent and the persistent thrum of rain on canvas. I unzip the door of the tent and peer out. The skies are a pale grey; the lake shines under scudding clouds. The islands radiate a cold light. A long lion-shaped mountain sprawls to the west, a table mountain to the south, and another pile of black ash lurks in the distance. The rocks are shaped like creeping shadows. The air smells of rain and moss.

I start awake throughout the night, as if in response to a noise, but whenever I unzip the tent the pale skies swirl silently and the lake gleams under the moon. Nothing moves across the charred rocks, and the irregular mountains cast their baroque shadows on the valley. It's as if the lake is haunted by the ghosts of explosions, by the shocks and sounds of a rumbling volcano, or as if something in the atmosphere makes me uneasy, causing me to jolt upright at intervals. By morning I am tired and unkempt, mumbling greetings at the French campers, who have already packed up their breakfast things and put on their walking boots by the time I emerge from the tent. The lake is mesmerizing, the wind tousling its surface, the waves sluicing against the spectral moss islands. The whole valley is disorienting; everything is improbably coloured, every rock clashing violently with its neighbour, and the ground I walk upon is pitted and gashed.

Most of the Victorians never reached the north. Many of them turned back at Thingvellir, already satisfied. Slightly exhausted, variously impressed, saddle-sore, Trollope and party trotted back to Reykjavík, as did Mrs. Alec Tweedie, who had much enjoyed her trip in this far-off region of ice and snow, so full of natural curiosities, so abounding in ancient history, so isolated and so quaint. She had not made much use of her fishermen's boots, but that was for another time, and her serge dress had been most practical. But the stalwarts packed up their horses and travelled north. Muttering about the Sagas, longing to see something still stranger and emptier, something even more like Thule. William Morris trotted north, sounding sporadic eulogies to the simple contemporary Icelanders. Richard Burton galloped north, hardly thinking about the Vikings but fascinated by the exotic, hoping to find more of it. He galloped off, hurling polysyllables into empty space. Erminities of ice and snow, he muttered, twirling his words like batons. Jerking his head backwards, trying to keep a distance between himself and the other packs of tourists.

Mývatn was where the terrible burning mountain of Krafla lay. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the travellers couldn't persuade the locals to take them there. Widespread opinion was that Mývatn was so chilling and unearthly that only the word “hell-mouth” could be applied to this part of the trail. Hideous gulphs, the travellers noted, festering stagnant waters, craters like cauldrons, emitting thick black smoke. The last eruption of Krafla, they whispered, was terrible and impetuous; it vomited flames and matter in a state of fusion, which rolled down in torrents and inundated the neighbouring fields. There were stories of rivers of fire, rolling three leagues from the mountain, a league in breadth, propelling globes of fire into the air, brilliant red balls which could be seen from miles away.

The morning was windswept. I walked across moss and lava towards Hverfjall, a black decapitated cone looking like a charred sand dune. The route crossed a dust and shrub track, the ground crackling under my feet. I walked slowly towards the red mountains. The track was deserted, the wind blasted dust into my eyes. I walked towards the Leirhnjúkur crater, where the hot springs were drawn on the map like blue tadpoles, piled up around the volcano of Krafla. It was beautiful, but cold and pale, a place of shadows emerging from the hollows, stretching along the pitted surface of the valley.

I struck off on a track along an empty mountainside, into a lava forest—the lava like gnarled branches, twined together. There was a rock bridge between two valleys. On one side the approach to Krafla, where the geothermal power station was smoking and steaming, its pipes running in intricate silver lines across the valley. On the other side was the lava forest, a memorial to past explosions. It was a two-sided view: the pastel paleness of the Krafla range, with the orange and cream mountains bright under the sun and the black wreckage of the lava rocks.

I dropped down along the side of the lava fields and followed their edges to the south. I walked to a point where the lava came to a halt, and I could see across to an offshoot of dark shapes, blackening the floor of another valley. The pastel mountains rose above, and the steam drifted from the sulphur pools below. As the afternoon drew on, the landscape softened, and I began to leave the lava behind. I walked through dust and grass layered upon gentle slopes. Ahead loomed the block forms of low mountains, crouching on the horizon, and the smooth sides of the Hverfjall crater looked like a smudge against the white sky. I was thinking of the legions of past travellers, who had stood and gazed at the lava field, like a freeze-frame image of an ocean on a stormy night. It was a sci-fi desert, with the rust colours of the mountains and the sharp black forests of lava. Undulating plains, erupting into perfect cones, splayed ridges, crater rings, table mountains standing isolated in space, with nothing but blackened rocks and vibrant flowers at their bases. There were rocks coated with reddish paste, and hissing pools, and the blue and white shapes of the glaciers in the south.

The Victorians stumbled above bottomless crevasses and en-gorging ravines; they looked across the ragged horrors of the blackened lava fields, towards the unknown vastness of the glacial plains. Morris found the region full of brutal mountains, and his horse jolted over the old lava, grass-grown except where the rocks thrust up through the moss. He looked across the great burnt pyramid of Námafjall; he admired the lava and grey-green slopes climbing towards the drab waste of the sulphur fields. He gazed at a curious collection of small cinder hills and lava, grown about with sweet grass. He found the lava near Krafla ‘terrible-looking enough,' all in dirty flakes at one end, or broken into rough fragments. He wandered through marshy tarns; finding islands of grass in the lava flow, he found huge clinker rocks of lava at the foot of the hills, steep sandheaps burned red and yellow by the sulphur. He passed through hills of sand and stone, a big green plain, a black ridge, mist and drizzle, ‘so that our guide was at fault,' and then he reached a long lava valley with low walls.

Into the trance came Richard Burton, muttering on the rocks. Standing in the lava forest, Burton struck a different note. Burton was comically furious. He had reached the crater lands of Thule, and insisted that he found them beautiful and arresting, but hardly
unheimlich
, hardly weird. He had suspected this all along, he had doubted that reality could be in any way as bizarre and disconcerting as everyone had promised, and in Mývatn he was convinced. ‘I imagine,' he wrote, irritably, ‘that most of the
contes bleus
about this great and terrible wilderness take their rise in the legendary fancies of the people touching the outlaws who are supposed to haunt it.' The surface was uneven, but hardly mountainous as other travellers had reported. It was a pile of old lava, far from devilish, with long dust-lines and stripes tonguing out into ashes and cindery sand. Burton thought it was a case of general hyperbole. Too many travellers were returning to Britain, parroting the expected, the wild weird version of Thule; whole travel books were being published using only the words ‘horror' and ‘amazement.' These people, Burton was beginning to think, had either never been anywhere else before, or they thought their books would sell better if they crammed them with exaggerations.