One should always treat stones with courtesy. This one has undoubtedly stood here in the district for a long age. It has endured all the hardships of the ice age and all the battering of the Atlantic since time out of mind. It remembers the last bird to crap on its head before the ice-age glacier engulfed it. And how could it forget those tedious times when the seals used to bask on its head after the land started to rise from the sea?
The mountain companions of Þórbergur’s childhood had given him a respect for geological time. He collected watches and measuring instruments which he used to chart his own, comparatively modest, experience of time and space. On his travels he kept a compass strapped around his wrist, and stowed more devices in his pockets – a small barometer, a thermometer, an elegant silver stopwatch, a pedometer and a device for measuring distances on maps. Perhaps this helped him to ensure he was going in a propitious direction. ‘It affected you differently whether you walked west or east on the path along the mountainside,’ he wrote of Helguhóll Hill. ‘There was more beauty heading west, and nature had more to say to you, stranger things had happened there and your thoughts grew deeper. It was as if you were never moving alone there.’ However, if you continue to walk west and not east, you will circle the world before you reach home again . . . Þórbergur settled in Reykjavik and didn’t come back to Suðursveit for a very long time. When he finally did so, he confessed that he felt he had been living in the wrong place for fifty-two years.
There’s a recreation of Þórbergur’s Reykjavik study in the museum: his neat manuscripts, written in fountain pen, are stacked on the desk. The bookshelves hold not only the Icelandic classics, but also the Communist Manifesto and Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen’s memoir From Thule to Rio. Between 1925 and 1936, Þórbergur dedicated himself to the international language Esperanto and compiled an Icelandic-Esperanto dictionary. He carefully recorded every word on an index card, building up a collection of more than 20,000 cards. This self-taught radical stylist of Icelandic began to advocate one of the world’s newest languages, which held the promise of easy international communication. For Þórbergur, writing was always a way of escaping, as well as recording, his surroundings.
Cumulus clouds are gathering on the horizon. The hay bales have already been brought in from the fields and wrapped in blue plastic; they are stacked in a pyramid in the yard. When rocks fell from Gerðistindur peak behind the farm, Þórbergur wrote, it always rained later in the day. I look hopefully across to the other peak, Fosstorfutindur, for ‘if a rock fell from thence, a dry spell would come’.
The rain has continued overnight, and motorists are being warned not to travel. The bridge that washed away near Jökulsárlón is being replaced, but meanwhile there is a breach in the ring road that circles Iceland. As there are no roads across Vatnajökull, it goes without saying there will be no buses. It seems I will get to know Höfn better than I intended. The breakfast room in the hotel faces towards Vatnajökull, but clouds have come down over the peninsula and our view back to the ice cap is lost in mist. Now Höfn could be any town in Iceland, with its bungalows of concrete and corrugated iron, their windows uniformly decorated with a crystal lamp or a lace curtain. The bare shrubs that mark each garden’s boundaries will soon be under snow. I chew at a slice of melon.
‘I hate this hotel,’ a guest says to her companion at the only other occupied table. I wonder why she feels so negatively about a place that is protecting her from the elements? I think of the communal room, the badstofa, where, less than a hundred years ago, visitors to Suðursveit would have sheltered with the family: heat and sounds rising from the restive cows below, the floor raked with ash to minimize the smell. I’m quite happy with this hotel.
What to do in such weather but stay in and write? There’s an Icelandic idiom for ruminating on something, að leggja heilann í bleyti – to soak one’s head. I decide to go swimming, hoping immersion will help me fathom the vast scales of time and space that are making my brain spin. The pool is just two streets from the hotel, but the rain is driving sideways, and my head is soaked before I even get there.
I have the pool to myself. Rain strikes the steaming surface of the water. Occasionally, as I raise my head to breathe, the icy drops prick my face, or worse, my eyes; later, in the sauna, I notice they have broken the skin on my arms. I run back outside and jump into the ice bucket, displacing a satisfying amount of water onto the already wet concrete. Back in the warm pool, when my limbs grow too weary for another length I tread water, aware of the depth beneath me, and remembering standing on the glacier.
As I shower, a woman enters the changing room, and we start talking about the awful weather. She tells me that Icelanders believe that different elements carry different kinds of knowledge. ‘The wind brings urgent messages, those that must be acted on instantly. This is why its noise blocks out all other sounds,’ she explains. ‘The water brings information that you can send away again on the next tide. But it may return to you – the sea allows dialogue. A rock brings a slower understanding: you live beside it, or carry it in your pocket, and the knowledge it holds will be revealed over time.’
To resolve their unforeseen difficulties, the Iceland Breakthrough expedition split. Most of the team set off in trucks with the heavy equipment, travelling overland around the glacier, while Paul and Jerry plan to fly the microlight across it. It will only be an hour-long flight, compared to their companions’ three-day journey.
I also need to get to the land just north of the glacier, where I have arranged to spend a month at the Gunnar Gunnarsson Institute, a cultural centre in the former home of one of Iceland’s best-loved novelists. There’s a bus that heads up the coast. Its winter schedule is online but it’s impossible to find the location of the bus stop. I ask at the petrol station which sends me to the swimming pool for information, the swimming pool sends me to the campsite, the campsite to the other petrol station, where someone suggests the airport. The airport is so small I don’t hold out much hope it will be open. I’m no stranger by now to the vagaries of travel in the north. Given my previous experience with buses, I decide to hitch, and so I end up speeding along the coast road with a young car mechanic called Birna Dogg. She navigates the vertiginous turns without fear, driving into the setting sun keeping an elbow on the wheel, while texting her boyfriend and rummaging in the glove compartment for chocolate-covered liquorice drops.
Paul and Jerry have almost completed their flight across the glacier when a severe storm heads them off. They have to divert around the coast. Then the exhaust shears, and the microlight tumbles out of the sky and crashes into a mountainside not far from my own destination in the Vatnajökull National Park. The others wait on the glacier for five days, fearing the worst. (This must have been one of the last expeditions without the luxury of mobile phones.) But then the microlight descends on them like a pterodactyl, and Paul and Jerry explain that they were sheltering under the microlight wing, eating their survival rations and making repairs to the crumpled undercarriage so they could get airborne again.
The source of the Jökulsá á Fjöllum lies many feet below them, in a huge cavern of ice. Geothermal heat rising from the Earth’s core has melted this cave from the ice cap, and then forged a steep chimney or moulin up to the surface where the explorers stand. Mick Coyne, a former Royal Marine, twists screws into the moulin’s smooth walls, and Paul and his team abseil down, then lower their kayaks gingerly.
The expedition’s acetylene lamps illuminate the cave. The men take their first bath in three weeks, stripping off their wetsuits and wallowing in the thermal spring, before setting off on the next stage of their journey. The river is shallow at first, but by the time the kayaks nose out from the ice cave into daylight it has become a torrent. The water is full of fine sediment known as rock flour or glacier milk, formed as the glacier eroded the bedrock over which it passed. The waves roll over each other, thick as concrete being churned, splashing up great gobbets that fall back heavily into the surge. S
oon the river banks are a mile wide in places. Steep volcanic rocks cause rapids and waterfalls, over which the microlight soars triumphantly. Sealed into their kayaks with spraydecks, the team bounce down the turbulent river, sometimes hitting ‘a stopper’ that holds them underwater and won’t let go. There are breathtaking rescues, a hole in the inflatable dingy carrying their supplies, and, as Paul says, ‘the real disaster, the sad loss of our last can of beer.’ In September they reach the sea. They have all made it, despite capsizes, despite the terrifying experiments with the microlight. Despite, no doubt, many things that didn’t make it onto film. Handshakes all round.
I wonder whether Paul was feeling the symptoms of his illness as he led the terrifying descent of the rapids. He was to live another two years, undergoing treatment for the leukaemia which had been diagnosed not long after his return. He had time to see his film win awards at the French Film Festival and to complete the last draft of the book, with his father’s help, from his hospital bed.
IV
Around midnight Birna drops me like a suspicious package at a petrol station.
It’s the day of the autumn gathering in Fljótsdalur, when sheep are brought down from the mountain to the safety of winter pastures. The Gunnar Gunnarsson Institute has closed so that staff can climb the hills to look for their livestock. Skotta has spent all day out in the rain herding sheep and sorting them according to markings cut into their ears. Now it’s time for her to gather up the rogue writer. As we drive through the night she informs me that there will always be bloody-minded sheep that stay out on the mountains, endangering their lives in the harsh storms.
An old ewe freezes in the headlights. Skotta brakes and curses, and it scrambles off into the darkness.
The electricity at Skotta’s farm has been down since the rains began. When we arrive at the museum, even though the lights are working, she is careful to show me where the candles are kept.
The next morning I’m relieved not to have to venture outdoors. I draw the curtains late, to find sheep grazing below my window. These must be the obedient ones.
As an ambitious young man Gunnar moved away from this valley of sheep farmers to Denmark. In the early twentieth century neither Iceland nor its language were considered a route to a literary reputation. He wrote his first bestseller The Family from Borg and the books that followed in Danish. Nevertheless, he set them in this landscape, the rural Iceland of his childhood, full of snow-capped mountains and glacial rivers. The Black Cliffs is even credited as being the first Icelandic crime novel. One entire room in the museum is dedicated to editions of Gunnar’s works, from the early novels in Danish dust-wrappers to the Icelandic translations that were published later in formidable sets bound in black leather. There have been several paperback editions since his death in 1975. I pick out a slim volume illustrated with wood engravings from among the English translations and take it upstairs to my apartment. I wrap myself in a blanket and begin to read.
It’s Benedikt’s twenty-seventh winter looking for sheep in the snow on the mountain slopes along the glacial river. He takes pride in recalling previous years when he’s set off on this same mission, with his faithful dog Leo and the ram Eitill, who can persuade any stubborn sheep to follow him. Benedikt’s journey will lead him through the uninhabited uplands, but he’s quite happy alone – more so, in fact, than with the few characters he meets along the way.
He breaks his journey at the last farm before the highlands, where he is given a supper of smoked meat and potatoes. Leo is fed and Eitill is supplied with hay. During the evening three shepherds blunder in, and ask Benedikt to help them look for their flock, which they neglected to gather weeks before. Although time is precious to a traveller out in ‘stormy moor, stone and sleet’, Benedikt agrees to help. He sets off early the next morning, accompanied by his irresponsible friends, and they sing to encourage themselves on through the miles of snow. When Benedikt reaches the shelter of the bothy at last, he must pick the snow off his animal companions, then the ice out of his own beard, before lighting the primus stove and filling the kettle with snow for coffee.
A new day and another distraction. Benedikt helps a young farmhand, Jon, look for his colts. Then the postman arrives, carrying mail to be ferried across the river. (It seems to me there’s a lot of traffic in this wilderness.) The postman persuades Benedikt to come home with him for a night’s rest and some grub. But the postman’s home is a long way off, and to get there they must row across the glacial river. The boat is almost swept away by the strong currents: ‘It was like reaching another country, almost another life . . . how would one ever go back?’ After this enforced river adventure, Benedikt is at last free to get on with his task and is drawn back to the mountains, to the ‘stony moor, storm and snow’.
He plans to search the farthest valley. Five hours there and five hours back – even though he’d rarely found a sheep there, he needed to check. He puts on his skis and glides along in moonlight over the frozen land. ‘The snowy mountains seemed so low and far away in the moonlight,’ Gunnar writes, ‘and here and there the stars glinted in the dark blackness of nocturnal ice. Such a journey was like a poem with rhymes and lovely words, it stayed in the blood like a poem, and like a poem must be learnt by heart.’
Although it’s prose, Gunnar’s tale of a man who endangers his own life in order to save sheep is so well-loved by Icelanders that it is often learnt by heart and quoted from memory. Benedikt’s own powers of recitation are limited, since he has to chip away his frozen beard with his knife in order to breathe: ‘the ice cap that was about to close his mouth’. If his beard has gone over to glacier, it looks like the rest of his body may soon follow. He makes a snow cave, where ‘he rested as well as he could, and dozed, but saw to it that he did not quite fall asleep, for if a man sleeps under the snow, hungry and exhausted, it is probable that he will never wake again in this life . . .’ The myth of going to sleep in the snow is a potent one. Dr Elisha Kent Kane, the senior medical officer of the Grinnell Expedition of 1850–51 which discovered Franklin’s final winter camp, writes of that ‘pleasurable sleepiness of the story books’:
I will tell you what this feels like, for I have been twice ‘caught out.’ Sleepiness is not the sensation. Have you ever received the shocks of a magneto-electric machine, and had the peculiar benumbing sensation of ‘can’t let go’, extending up to your elbow-joints? Deprive this of its paroxysmal character; subdue, but diffuse it over every part of the system, and you have the so-called pleasurable feelings of incipient freezing. It seems even to extend to your brain.
The trope of braving the elements perhaps never to return is common in Icelandic literature (the memory of a boy lost in a snowstorm is what motivates the detective Erlendur in Arnaldur Indriðason’s crime novels). Happily, Benedikt does return from his mission – although he finds he has missed Christmas Day.
Benedikt was based on a local shepherd, Benedikt Sigurjónsson, whose story Gunnar read in an Icelandic magazine that reached him in Denmark. Whether sheep had been in his dreams already, or Benedikt’s spirit somehow summoned him, by the time Advent was published in 1936, Gunnar was making plans to return to the remote Fljótsdalur valley where he had grown up, and keep sheep of his own.
There’s often snow in September on the distant mountains. Not these mountains, but the ones beyond. Skúli, the director of the Gunnarsson Institute, tells me that ten years ago, there would have been snow here too. There’s no snow yet, but the persistent rain continues. Within a few days, even a stranger like me can see that all is not as it should be. The fields across the valley are under water. The river grows, until it runs from one side of the wide valley to the other. The flood becomes critical. The waters rise too quickly for farmers to rescue their sheep. This year, the flock might have been safer up in the hills.
Gunnar bought farmland at Skriðuklaustur in the valley where he had been born and commissioned the architect Fritz Höger to create his dream home. Höger modelled his designs o
n the solid farmsteads of Germany, a far cry from the valley’s other buildings with their red roofs. Gunnar had imagined an even grander project – the blueprints show enough barns and steadings for 1,500 sheep. He drew up plans for a farm of the future in the same way he might have plotted a novel. But the future was changing in ways he could not control. War in Europe had brought social change: labourers were moving to Reykjavik, food prices were rising, and there were restrictions on the import of building materials. The influence of the war is apparent in the fabric of the building: the basalt rocks on the exterior walls were sourced from a nearby waterfall.
Still, it is an impressive building, with an elegant arch over the recessed doorway and a majestic balcony supported by sturdy pillars. At the bottom of the stairway leading to my apartment there’s a framed photograph of Gunnar dressed in tweeds at lambing time. He seems taken by surprise, windswept and leaning back slightly from the camera, his smile blown off course but genuine, unlike the studied frown of the literary portraits. He looks happy. But he was mistaken to think he could combine work as a sheep farmer and author; he wrote little, those first years back in Fljótsdalur. (The only manuscripts on display in the museum are his account books.) In a glass case in the library I find proof copies of his works in translation, each open at a page spread which shows his notes in the margins, with suggestions for improvements. I ask Skúli if I can take a closer look. He unlocks the case, and takes out the English edition of Ships in the Sky. He leafs through it. ‘Well!’ he says, surprised, then passes it reluctantly to me. Gunnar’s corrections only cover the first two pages. The sheep were certainly a distraction.
The Library of Ice Page 19