The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  The magnetic curves sweep out from Boothia Felix over the entire world. They swerve around the map, as if it were an ice rink and these were the skaters’ traces. They lead down in an elegant arc from Washington to Antarctica and up in an ellipse to South Africa – Natal – then rise again to roam to the Persian Gulf. Some parts of the world (the Americas, Greenland) are covered by these lines – others (Asia, Russia) are completely blank. Britain looks complicated, an island too small for its outline to be drawn with much accuracy. Its outlying islands have atrophied.

  The map identifies various countries, cities, rivers and an assortment of additional topographical details. How odd it looks, with its obsolete magnetic pole, its doubtful shorelines and names that have long since been supplanted by others. I wonder how soon the maps of today will look strange to future readers and drinkers.

  V

  PHILOSOPHERS

  UNDER THE GLACIER

  Gunnar Gunnarsson Institute, Iceland

  Vatnajökull, Iceland

  Tears fall in all the rivers. Again the driver

  Pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts

  Upon his deadly journey; and again the writer

  Runs howling to his art.

  W. H. Auden, ‘Journey to Iceland’

  I

  ‘One should simply say and do as little as possible. Keep your eyes peeled. Talk about the weather. Ask what sort of summer they had last year, and the year before that,’ the Bishop of Iceland tells a young theologian, whom he is sending to a remote village in the shadow of Snæfellsjökull. He adds, ‘Don’t try to put anything right.’

  The bishop is perturbed by rumours he has heard about the parish: the church is boarded up, and there is talk of heathen rites and a woman’s corpse buried within the glacier. The pastor hasn’t drawn his salary for twenty years and won’t reply to the bishop’s letters. Halldór Laxness’s late novel Under the Glacier examines how the religious certainties of Reykjavik unravel when confronted by a pagan nature cult.

  The bishop has no choice but to investigate Pastor Jón and, since he requires a detailed report, he selects as his emissary a man with some skill in shorthand. The young man, who calls himself a ‘priestling’, has reservations about the mission: in his eyes, shorthand is no qualification for disarming a cult, and a tape-recorder is no part of the armoury of faith. ‘I’m not cut out for derring-do,’ he says. But the bishop reassures him that he merely needs to observe, take notes and record: it will not be his job to resolve heresies. The style of the report is very important: ‘Don’t be personal – be dry! . . . Write in the third person as much as possible. Be academic, yes, but in moderation.’

  Thus instructed, the emissary catches a bus to the glacier, with his notebooks and tape recorder in a duffel bag. The bishop has not given him any advice on buses. He discovers that his fellow travellers are as ‘commonplace’ as he himself, ‘they sidle off the bus at unexpected places and vanish into the moorland as if they lived in some bog there, or else the driver pulls up at some unaccountable point in the middle of nowhere, and tosses out of the window some trifle, which usually lands in a puddle.’

  The emissary describes his journey to Snæfellsjökull as if he is travelling to the back of beyond, but it’s not so very far: the snowy peak can be seen from Reykjavik on a clear day. Perhaps because of its proximity to the capital, it was the first Icelandic glacier to be included on maps. In 1539 Olaus Magnus noted ‘iokel’ over a spit of the west coast on his Carta Marina. Iokel or these days jökull (glacier) is a diminutive of jaki, and originally meant ‘icicle’ – it is related to the Anglo-Saxon gicel (as in îs-gicel). But the word came to denote something much larger. The cartographers Mercator and Ortelius also marked Snæfellsjökull on their maps in the sixteenth century. The glacier acquired a role in fiction too, when Jules Verne used it as a portal to the centre of the Earth in his novel of 1864.

  Other Icelandic glaciers are more elusive, including the one I have come to see. Vatnajökull doesn’t appear on early maps, even though its ice cap once covered at least one-tenth of the country. It doesn’t even feature in the cartographic classic Chorographica Islandia, published in the early 1700s, which provides a register of several glaciers. It wasn’t until Sveinn Pálsson’s treatise on glaciers was completed at the end of that century that surveys of Vatnajökull were published, and the names of its outlet glaciers recorded. As the Little Ice Age drew to a close, more cartographic expeditions could take place; ironically, it was as world temperatures began to rise that the mapping of Vatnajökull began. Despite its retreat, this ice cap is still the largest in Europe. From above, it looks like a comic strip splash of spilled milk, its outlet glaciers seeping between spurs of rock. Glaciers are often named after their shape or location, or a feature of the local landscape. Vatna – of water, of rivers. Little did I know how watery my journey to Vatnajökull was to be.

  I sit dejectedly in the petrol station with the other passengers, two elderly women and their friend, a confused man with bruises on his scalp. Two hours from Reykjavik, the driver has tumbled us out in the village of Vík, and announces he won’t drive any further that day. We all need to get to Höfn, the last stop on this route, and six hours’ drive away, but our protests make no impression on the driver. High winds and heavy rains are forecast. It won’t be safe to travel the south coast road. Wait and see if there’s another bus tomorrow, he says. The doors sigh shut, and the coach disappears back around the mountain towards the capital.

  One of the women gives me a handmade card on which an Icelandic prayer has been stuck down and adorned with silver stickers. ‘I think you need this,’ she says, in careful English. I pocket it gratefully. We occupy the makeshift coffee bar by the cash register. Whenever a car stops for fuel, we take it in turns to dash outside, splashing through the puddles on the forecourt to ask the driver where they are going. Of the few vehicles, none is planning to make the long journey. An hour later I smile goodbye and good luck to my comrades and shoulder my rucksack again, puzzling over the shifting logistics of my journey. There’s a hostel on the hill, but the road that leads to it has turned into a river.

  My dorm is empty, except for Mildred, a frail nomad from Vermont, who tells me she comes back to Vík every year. She stares intently past my shoulder and out of the window, into the night; it takes me a while to realize that she can barely see. I throw my books onto the bunk above Mildred’s, climb the ladder after them, and lulled by the rain dripping from the gutters, I begin to read about how the world was created from the Élivángar, three rivers of ice.

  Gylfi, the earliest known Scandinavian king, is curious for knowledge about the gods worshipped by his rivals – in other words, the secrets of power. He travels to their great hall in disguise as an old man, and begs for a night’s lodging. One of the three rulers, Hár, offers meat and drink and asks what more he can give the traveller. Gylfi requests stories: first he asks Hár and his companions to explain what the world was like before humans existed. And Hár tells him that there was no world at first, just rivers of ice: ‘The streams called Ice-waves, those which were so long come from the fountainheads that the yeasty venom upon them had hardened like the slag that runs out of the fire, these then became ice; and when the ice halted and ceased to run, then it froze over above. But the drizzling rain that rose from the venom congealed to rime, and the rime increased, frost over frost, each over the other, even into Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void.’

  Glaciers are still officially defined by geologists as ‘dynamic rivers of ice’. While the northern part of the Yawning Void, ‘filled with heaviness, and masses of ice and rime’, seems to suggest glaciers, its southern aspect is reminiscent of volcanic action. Jafnhárr, the second ruler to speak, describes the south as lit by ‘sparks and glowing masses’. Just as the rivers of ice and ‘all terrible things’ had their source in the grim cold of the north, says Thridi the third king, the south infects everything with its heat. These two opposing forces, heat an
d cold, met in Ginnungagap, where the climate is ‘as mild as windless air’. From this meeting Ymir, the first frost giant, was created by a process akin to condensation: ‘when the breath of heat met the rime, so that it melted and dripped, life was quickened from the yeast-drops, by the power of that which sent the heat, and became a man’s form.’ From Ymir in turn, the world as we know it was formed: his flesh became the earth, his sweat the sea.

  Each of Gylfi’s questions leads to another, and by the hundredth page the three kings (who know very well he is not really the old tramp he appears to be) show signs of exasperation. Finally, they take the easiest escape route. Gylfi hears ‘great noises on every side of him’; and on looking around finds that ‘lo, he stood out of doors on a level plain, and saw no hall there and no castle. Then he went his way forth and came home into his kingdom, and told those tidings which he had seen and heard; and after him each man told these tales to the other.’

  The story of Gylfi opens the Prose Edda, an anonymous work which survives in seven manuscripts; no manuscript is complete, and each has variations within it. Three are fragments. Its compilation is attributed to a thirteenth-century scholar, Snorri Sturluson, but its origins go back much further. This Edda, and other works of Old Norse literature, are the tales people told each other, shaping the way they saw their world in words, just as the Earth itself had been forged by heat and cold. It is these fragmentary texts echoing earlier tales that we rely on for the history of the first Icelanders.

  I am back at the petrol station an hour before the bus is due, with an explanation ready for yesterday’s ticket. I find Mildred there, helping herself to another coffee from the flask on the counter. Strange – she was in bed when I checked out of the hostel. The rain is still falling. A rainbow hovers over the forecourt, one end rising from the petrol pumps, and disappearing over the mountain. When the bus arrives, it is in disguise: another company’s vehicle with the Strætó logo on a laminated sign taped to the cracked window.

  The bus drives east though the wide Mýrdalssandur estuary. Rivulets of glacial water, swollen with rain, twine through the black sands. A van has parked off the road, and where the great rock of Hjörleifshöfði rises from the flat land, a woman in a periwinkle blue dress is preparing for a photoshoot.

  The word in Icelandic for an estuary, or the delta of a river – a spot where one river becomes many or many become one before entering the ocean – is ós. Back in Reykjavik, I’d met members of Ós Pressan, a group for writers working in any language who have chosen to live in Iceland. A multilingual literature group needs a name that can work in more than one language, as Ós Pressan’s website explains: ‘Move the accent and, in English, O’s becomes the sound of delight and surprise upon discovering something new. Accent to the right again and it becomes Oś, the Polish word for axis.’ Iceland is a nation that is wary of including loan words in its language. In place of them, there’s a tendency to revive existing Icelandic words that are falling out of use. Thus sími, a Norse word for ‘thread’, became the official term for ‘telephone’; a mobile telephone is farsími, or a ‘travelling thread’. Surely a nation of such linguistic playfulness appreciates how Ós Pressan’s puns enrich the concept of an estuary: the shifting accent an expression of multiple ideas.

  Each side of the bus gives a view of a different world. The road squeezes between shore and mountain scree. Sheets of rain cross a streak of yellow sky, falling from the grey clouds to the grey sea. Clouds over the sea and fog over the mountains. Basalt cliffs and straggling white waterfalls. More mountains. More waterfalls. The hours pass. I am lulled into a similar lassitude to that which creeps into W.H. Auden’s voice in the recording of his poem ‘Journey to Iceland’:

  . . the issue of steam from a cleft

  In the rock, and rocks, and waterfalls brushing the

  Rocks, and among the rocks birds.

  The rocks are evidence of Iceland’s transformation by the forces of fire and ice described in the Prose Edda. The road crosses the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, one of the few places in the world where this submerged mountain range rises above the water. It marks a boundary between two tectonic plates which pull a little further apart each year – a movement no bigger than the width of a postage stamp. Where the continental crust stretches beyond its limits, fissures begin to appear on the Earth’s surface. Magma surges through these cracks, sometimes taking the form of volcanoes. This district has been named Öræfi, ‘the wasteland’, ever since the Öræfajökull eruption of 1362 destroyed an entire community. From the north-western rim of the summit crater of Öræfajökull rises Iceland’s highest peak. I know the mountain is there, but the peak is lost in clouds; beyond it, to the north, lies the icy mass of Vatnajökull. The wipers are working at their highest setting over the cracked windscreen.

  The last few passengers get off the bus at Skaftafell, a lonely hotel and visitor centre, and George, the driver, invites me to occupy the jump seat. He tells me he’s from Transylvania: ‘Ha! Ha! Dracula!’ He makes the joke quickly, before I can say anything. The mountains loom ahead in the last half hour of daylight, and between their jagged peaks a glacial outlet slumps towards us. George deftly changes down the gears, in anticipation of the approaching uphill bend; it seems as if he will drive up onto the ashen tongue of ice, intending to use it as a road, as people did in the old days, walking miles from the north wearing nothing but sheepskin on their feet in order to trade with German merchants on this coast.

  The road turns sharply, just before we reach the mountains, and the bus edges round their base. George has been working this route for a month: he used to drive buses in London, he tells me, but he loathed the Saturday night shift. He likes it here: generous holidays and plenty of time to read the spy novels he enjoys. (‘John le Carré?’ I ask. ‘Who?’ says George.) We pass signs of abandoned efforts at construction – scattered bits of piping, a Portakabin and a half-built bridge which points across the sands into nowhere, with no water flowing underneath. Further on new, unbridged streams have formed from water running off the glacier. We approach a lagoon, in which icebergs are gleaming faintly like floating candles in the dusk. It is the tourist hub of the glacier, but there’s no one in the car park today. George stops the bus. ‘Jökulsárlón. Five minutes,’ he says. He gets out, and lights a cigarette.

  Five minutes doesn’t seem long enough to wander across the rough moraine to the water’s edge. I hang out by the bus with George. He gestures moodily towards the lagoon. ‘Seals. See?’ I see no seals. Then he points out Diamond Beach, named for the chunks of ice which wash up on the sands. There is more than a visual link between glacial ice and gemstones. It was once thought that minerals were created by cold temperatures. Pliny the Elder wrote in the first century: ‘Crystal is formed by a very strong congelation and can only be found in regions where the winter snow freezes with the greatest intensity. It is with certainty an ice, hence the name the Greeks gave it, κρύσταλλος, ice’. The belief was still held in Elizabethan times, with the natural philosopher William Gilbert stating that ‘Lucid gems are made of water.’ He explained that this occurs ‘just as Crystal, which has been concreted from clear water, not always by a very great cold, as some used to judge, and by very hard frost, but sometimes by a less severe one, the nature of the soil fashioning it, the humour or juices being shut up in definite cavities, in the way in which spars are produced in mines’. (Gilbert’s studies of electricity have stood the test of time better, and he is credited with coining the term ‘electric force’.) It’s understandable how these theories arose, as gemstones and ice do both have a crystalline structure.

  Five minutes is up. Crossing the rickety one-lane bridge over the mouth of the lagoon, the bus takes a punch from the wind and veers towards the suspension cables.

  ‘I wonder,’ I say, ‘what this road will be like in winter?’

  ‘Me too,’ he replies. ‘I am little bit scared.’

  We have exhausted our conversation, or perhaps George is embarr
assed by this admission, and he turns on the radio. The soft, confiding voices of the Icelandic presenters are incomprehensible to us both, but it’s reassuring to know we’re still in reach of human society. Two words I recognize – ‘Culture Club’ – and a song comes on about doing time and loving and losing. George hums along.

  There have been few cars on the road, but we come up behind a cautious queue of tail lights. George puts his foot down. ‘Black clouds. Storm ahead,’ he announces, tonelessly, and overtakes everything. Visibility is poor, but the bus presses on into the storm. With darkness the deluge comes, and our headlights bore a path through the raindrops bounding back from the asphalt.

  Höfn is out on a spit of land, and as the approach is circuitous, I see its distant glow long before we reach it. Between the darkness of sea and sky its line of lights on the horizon is as thin as the scales on a strip of smoked fish skin.

  II

  Like the bishop’s emissary, I am weighed down with recording devices. Notebooks, camera, laptop, Dictaphone. As for my Bible, I have a copy of Iceland Breakthrough by Paul Vander-Molen which I discovered six months ago in a house-clearance shop. In the book, the British engineer and explorer describes his expedition to Iceland in 1983. He planned to land on the south coast, cross the ice cap and travel the length of the river Jökulsá á Fjöllum from its source in the ice caves beneath the glacier to the Greenland Sea on the north coast. His team would use daring contraptions to navigate the waterfalls and rapids in the second half of their journey: part microlight, part kayak. Travelling solo, I have chosen Paul and his team as my companions, and hope to follow their footsteps, where I can. I won’t worry about the rivers yet, I tell myself – just the ice.