ANOTHER WORLD
BY A ROUTE OBSCURE AND LONELY
HAUNTED BY ILL ANGELS ONLY
WHERE AN EIDOLON, NAMED NIGHT,
ON A BLACK THRONE REIGNS UPRIGHT,
I HAVE REACHED THESE LANDS BUT NEWLY
FROM AN ULTIMATE DIM THULE
FROM A WILD WEIRD CLIME THAT LIETH, SUBLIME
OUT OF SPACE . . . OUT OF TIME!
“DREAMLAND,” EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)
I left this outpost of my country, this luminescent set of islands, and travelled further north. It was an inevitable momentum. The idea of Thule expanded with the maps. As knowledge of the north increased, so the ends of the world shifted, and a land beyond the limits of the known world had to move with changes in cartography. It was a story about unbounded curiosity; as new northern lands were found, so Thule was reapplied, sometimes for rhetorical effect, sometimes from a sense that a recent discovery must be the last land, the mysterious land sighted by Pytheas. The idea of Thule was entwined with mysteries and gaps. It was intriguing to imagine Pytheas arriving in a northern land, finding a midnight sun, and sailing home. But it was an act of imagination even to think about Pytheas’s journey; from the surviving fragments it was hardly possible to say for certain where Thule might have been. Any discussion of Thule as a particular place was an elaborate piece of reconstruction. It was like rebuilding an ancient temple from a few scattered stones. A hypothetical version of Thule could run along, certain of a few things, plunging into vagaries on others. Thule was a land where the sun shone through the summer nights, and where the winters were dark. It might have been near a congealed ocean, or near a sluggish ocean, or near a frozen ocean. It might have been a place inhabited by barbarians of some sort, though this was uncertain. It might have been six days’ sail north of Britain, but this could have meant due north, or north-east, or north-west, and Pytheas had previously found it difficult to calculate distances with accuracy. It was a land with a curious array of qualities—not exactly like anywhere, but redolent of many places. All the lands of the north contained elements of Thule—from Shetland to Svalbard. Even as I travelled, they were lands still valued for their beauty and emptiness. Pure in parts, with the soft sunshine gleaming across their ancient rocks.
For the Victorians on their steamers, Shetland was hardly a contender. Iceland was the only plausible Thule. They stayed stubbornly on their ships, passing the Faroe Islands in a flurry of excitement, pointing out the turf houses of Tórshavn and admiring the great circling crowds of seabirds. Then they waited for Iceland to appear on the horizon. Mrs. Alec Tweedie, William Morris, Anthony Trollope, Sir Richard Burton, understood that the rough outline of the north was almost complete, the pencil lines were convening on the maps. But they wanted Ultima Thule to be a land unlike any other, a land weird enough for a mystery lasting thousands of years. They imagined travelling to Thule as a ride to a Gothic Utopia. They travelled with Edgar Allan Poe in mind, reciting his fantasy verse on the theme of Thule:
I HAVE REACHED THESE LANDS BUT NEWLY
FROM AN ULTIMATE DIM THULE
FROM A WILD WEIRD CLIME THAT LIETH, SUBLIME
OUT OF SPACE . . . OUT OF TIME!
They wanted to see nature in its weirdest outfits, performing its most hysterical tantrums and fits. In the lands of the Icelandic Thule, the eternal works of nature were grotesque, and scarcely even eternal. The land shifted throughout the ages, birthing new mountains and islands, the rocks were constantly shattered and flooded with steaming waters. Iceland was a land where flames burst from the ice and burning lava spread across the land. A land in a state of flux: the volcanic flames flickering above ancient glaciers, red on white, the fires fading into the purple blackness of the lava fields. A land where ice mountains melted and flames cooled to rock. Bold, callous colours, crazy stretches of whiteness lurking in the gaps among the barren mountains, savage darts of flame in the dusk. The Victorians came for the mountain of Hekla, once thought to be the entrance to hell, or for Snaefellsjökull, Jules Verne’s entrance to the centre of the earth. They came for the view over the ragged lava piles, and the moon landscapes. They came for the thousand cones and spikes of volcanic ground, forged in successive eruptions. A place like Thule: an interim point between the familiar and the outlandish.
When the Victorians arrived, there was a living convention of perorations to the ragged lava plains, the devil holes, the sulphur pots, the lairs of Beelzebub, each bubbling spring or jagged rift representing a different aspect of the Dark Prince. Most of the travellers’ hysteria focused around the Geysir, though a few amazed words were reserved for the volcano Krafla in the north of Iceland and the terrible former Viking capital of Thingvellir, where the earth cracked in two. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Dr. Uno von Troil, Mr. William Jackson Hooker, Sir George Steuart Mackenzie, and Ebenezer Henderson had vied for exploratory firsts. They were frequently astonished, like Dr. Von Troil, who travelled in 1772, finding a devastated land of barren mountains, eternal snow and vitrified cliffs. Sir George Steuart Mackenzie, Baronet, Fellow of the Royal Society, travelling in 1810, found that despite his various titles he could not convey the mingled raptures of wonder, admiration and terror with which his breast was filled, and that was just at the sight of the Geysir, the exploding hot spring. These early visitors divided their bemusement into sub-headings: ‘On the Pestiferous Effects of the Air,’ ‘Of Steeped or Macerated Fish,’ or ‘Of the Peculiar Instinct of the Horses in this District.’ They were transfixed by the fantastic groups of hills, craters and lava, the distant snow-crowned glaciers, the mists rising from a waterfall, the profound silence, glowering clouds, the crazed element of fire ravaging the land.
The Victorians gathered coats and hampers, and arrived in the capital, Reykjavík, buying up horses, trotting out to the sites—the Great Geysir, Thingvellir, or the lava plains in the north. They stood in the rain, reciting the Sagas, as William Morris did; they came in genteel tour groups, like Anthony Trollope and his party, spilling slippers and smoking jackets onto the lava fields, in a procession of nearly a hundred horses. Through repetition in their diaries, the arrival became a ritual, a moment of recited stanzas and set phrases. The boat would dock, after a lurching voyage of some weeks, the passengers sick at heart, longing for the shore. They saw mountains standing out sullen and forbidding against a grey sky. They admired the scorched lava fields stretching away. In the summer the nights were dark blue, and the sky was always tinted with daylight colours. The interior stretched away, an inhospitable waste at the time, almost entirely unknown.
The banner still hangs, LAND OF FIRE AND ICE, across the rain-doused country. Iceland touts its wares. The tourists come for the natural pyrotechnics, as the Victorians did. Everyone is dragged to Iceland on a tractor beam of hyperbole, lured by stories from the constantly mutating island. The tourist brochures breathe visions of the earth’s crust, spewed liberally across the land. A land like a disaster film, a natural gore-flick—the country scattered with the innards of the earth. Keflavík Airport, outside Reykjavík, was overrun with tourists jostling towards the luggage carousel. Tourists decked in climbing gear, preparing to hike through the lava plains, across the spacescapes, across the brilliant orange pastel sands of the sulphur bays. They stood, watching backpacks turning circles, everything stamped with a sticker: the Volcano Experience Inc., Arctic Tours, TM.
I had been travelling for a day, from Aberdeen to London, and then from London to Iceland. But it still seemed indecently fast, when I thought of the Victorians in their cramped steamships, bitterly seasick, finding the arrival in Iceland an enormous relief. I had landed into a rainstorm, but I was wrapped in waterproofs, sitting in a bus to Reykjavík. The rain slapped against the windows. The tourists were slightly sodden; we were all sitting wetly on our bags, rustling in waterproof layers. As the bus moved across the lava plains, the country was grey. The sea was blanched and tepid. The dry grass stretched to the sea; there were flatlands where ho
rses grazed. Low shrubs took the place of trees. A white stone church stood on a hill. The road ran past the serried stacks of flat-topped mountains, rising from the shrublands and the rock plains.
A plain of cracked earth stretched away, littered with black ash rocks, coated with thick moss. The ground was always uneven; it looked like an immense sculpture, representing sultry waves. A crazed piece of national art, it was motion petrified, retaining something of the dynamism of rocks that have succumbed to the force of the lava burning beneath them. Above the spikes of the lava plain, the mountains rose and the grey clouds moved slowly above. There were mountains shaped like explosions, extruding sharp points. There were long-backed ridges, draped in cloud vapour, and clear cones, their sides neatly chiselled.
The land was rain-drenched; the afternoon was cloaked in mist. On the bus I stared through the smeared windows at the lava fields. The city of Reykjavík stretched languidly along the coast, dwindling into low-rise concrete at the edges, crowded in the centre around a small lake. The suburbs were full of American-style diners, mall-strips interspersed with trees. The sea was cold white, hammered flat by a grey sky. The centre of the city was made of corrugated iron, its small houses pressed closely together. The streets were teeming with drenched travellers, shuddering at bus stops in their wax jackets and woollen hats, or staring damply into lighted shop windows. Stepping off the bus, I walked through Reykjavík into the Parliament Square, where there was a Café Paris, an art nouveau hotel and a green-stained statue. The light shook across the city; the pink tips of the mountains were silhouetted against the cold sky. Hallgríms Church was brightly lit, its main tower decked with flashy lighting, looking like a pushy cousin of the Chrysler Building in New York. There was a revolving restaurant, balanced on a great stack of towers, like a stylized sculpture of a mushroom. I reached the Town Hall, built in glowering space station style, its black form reflected on the waters of the Pond, a lake in the centre of the town.
I walked through the evening. The wind swept across the waters of the lake, distorting the reflection of the buildings. Arctic skuas shrieked across the water. There were signs to Viking sites, to the Saga Museum, to the National Gallery, to the Volcano Show: ‘You will be amazed as the earth explodes before your eyes.’ As the whine of planes above the city died into the damp evening I followed the sign to the Volcano Show. The Volcano Show was offering a glimpse of the natural weirdness of Iceland. It was like a circus sideshow, the sort of grotesque turn the Victorians might have enjoyed. ‘Fire and Ice!’ said the sign. ‘You will not believe your eyes!’ In a small building there was a projector and a wizened man with wild greying hair and a gaze of intense frustration. He saw me, fixed me with a disconsolate stare, and said slowly: ‘The Volcano Show has followed the same timetable for seventeen million years, and it will follow the same timetable for the next seventeen million years.’
‘So are you the person who films the volcanoes?’ I asked.
‘No no,’ he shook his flimsy beard. ‘That man is older than God.’
‘And how long has the cinema been running?’ I asked.
‘The cinema is also older than God. Step back please.’
And another person stepped up to buy a ticket.
‘The Volcano Show,’ he said to her, ‘has followed the same timetable for seventeen million years, and it will follow the same timetable for the next seventeen million years.’ And she smiled and paid, moved along, preparing the stage for the next recipient of the same gag, repeated to fade, to the end of time, or until Iceland consumed itself in a vibrant explosion of fire.
The cinema was a small dirty room, with bits of dismembered projector scattered across the floor. Dozens of tourists had been shoe-horned in here by the Volcano Man, who was shuffling in and out, muttering about technical hitches. The show was an hour late, but he seemed not to care; he knew he was doomed to another evening of cracking the same old jokes, and he couldn’t quite get up the impetus to start. There was an entire busload of English school-children, inexplicably dropped here, a crowd of Italians, a few Germans, and a quiet Dutch couple at the front. ‘Dutch people!’ said the Volcano Man. ‘You have a wonderful country. A wonderful country. I once knew someone from Holland—’ And then he stopped mid-sentence, gripped by a crashing sense of futility.
With an enormous effort of will, struggling against overpowering lassitude, he cleared his throat and stumbled to the front of the small hall, anorak slung over his shoulders, trousers brutally tapered, ending short of his ankles. Eyeing the audience with something almost like hatred, he tried to smile.
‘Here in the Volcano Show,’ he began, making a grandiose circle with his fingers, ‘we patiently await the next disaster . . . We began showing films here twenty-eight years ago. The last time we had a big explosion here in Iceland was during the three o’clock show, on 17 June 2000. At 3:45 P.M. there was a 6.5 Richter scale earthquake in Hekla, the biggest for eighty years. It was so very violent we felt it in Reykjavík, the seats started going up and down, nobody ran out, people thought it was part of the show.’
Everyone laughed. The Volcano Man stared balefully at the crowd, waiting for them to subside. ‘My father began filming after the war. In 1963 he filmed the island of Surtsey coming out of the sea. On 8 September 1977 we had an eruption of a pipe by Lake Mývatn, the volcanic lake in the far north of Iceland. This was my project for the next sixteen years. There was a very big magma chamber under the ground, and when the magma chamber erupted, the ground went down. The main problem was when the crater was open, it was never more than for four hours, so I had to wait there. All my money disappeared into Lake Mývatn, I hope to be able to fish it out some day.’
Fainter laughter. Fidgeting from the party of English school-girls. A stifled yawn from the Volcano Man. ‘In one day the whole town was raised by thirty centimetres. A bathing cave near Mývatn that day became too warm for bathing. It still is. Another one used to be too cold for bathing. That day, it became perfect.’
A last laugh from the audience and the Volcano Man stumbled away, shaking his head. I imagined him muttering in the projector room while he started the film. The film further defied the audience: there was no plot, no drama, it was a doleful account of the Volcano Man trailing around, trying to reach volcanic explosions in time, chartering aeroplanes, seeking death-defying experiences. Though the Volcano Man was clearly hoping some violent disaster would save him from any further appearances at the Volcano Show, real physical harm evaded him: the magma moved too slowly to threaten him; his helicopter always worked, despite his predictions that it would crash horribly on the rocks.
‘Once,’ his voice narrated, over the flickering blurred shots of magma explosions far in the distance, ‘we got some four-wheel drives, and drove across the ice cap. We had heard scientists say there were fractures in the rocks. Our four-wheel drive ran out of gas in front of the lava flow.’
On the film, there was an explosion from a piece of ice far away; the camera panned, the picture coming gradually into focus. A remote image of fire spluttering onto the ice, cracking the surface. The voice-over came again, steeped in disappointment: ‘Fortunately we managed to start the car again.’
The show ended in a shuddering anti-climax, and we all filed slowly out of the hall. ‘Come again,’ said the Volcano Man, indifferently.
The wind gusting the rain into my face, I walked around the lake. At the hotel, the rooms were painted pale shades; the furniture was pine, everything adapted to minimalism. The aeroplanes whined into the city airport. A group of teenagers in jeans and trainers ran along the street pushing a stalled car, sweating in spite of the rain and wind. The crowds streamed into the bars, and I followed them to a place called Kaffibarinn. They sat in groups drinking in a steady progress, moving from reserved to riotous. They drank until they were ready to dance. Then they pushed the chairs back and started to sling themselves around. The barman said to me: ‘See them, they want to kill themselves. It’s amazing more don’t die.�
� He laughed, showing a mouth without front teeth, and pulled everyone another pint. The thumping bars of Reykjavík were packed with the denizens of studied decadence, trying for total alcoholic collapse. The drinkers began ricocheting out of the bars in the small hours, filing towards the kebab shops. They lined up along the edges of the pavements, baying across the road at each other.
Abandoned to the soft evening, in the town that staged its own eternal return of rain and wind, I stayed on the streets as the colours of the sky shifted from rain-grey to deep blue. The small town resounded to a low beat from the bars and the clubs; the night was cold and dank. As the sun began to rise, the streets quietened. The wind died. Everything seemed to wait, for the collective hangover of the morning.
Reykjavík was the transition point between homely steamer and weird country, and the nineteenth-century travellers struggled against the feeling, but they had to admit to finding it less strange than they had hoped. Instead of a baroque cathedral, manufactured entirely from lava, or an enormous troll palace on a hill, they found a line of shabby buildings spread out on a sallow shore. ‘Viewed from the sea, the capital of Iceland has a very mean appearance. It is situated in a narrow flat, between two low hills, having the sea on the north-east, and a small lake on the south-west side,’ said Sir George Steuart Mackenzie. ‘The little town of Reykjavík consists of a single broad street, with houses and cottages scattered around. The number of inhabitants does not amount to 500,’ said Madame Ida Pfeiffer. ‘There are but two streets, and these are hardly worthy of the name. Decayed fish, offal, filth of every description, is tossed anywhere for the rain to wash away, or for the passer-by to trample into the ground,’ said Sabine Baring-Gould, M.A. Useful, was the best they could reach for. Quaint, a few rolled the word around in their mouths, trying it out, but somehow it didn’t suit the cramped houses and the smell of putrescence. Must get better they decided, galloping off on their horses, to wax euphoric over some hot springs.
The Ice Museum Page 8