The Ice Museum

by Joanna Kavenna

  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:

  ‘Ages thou numberest ten, unconquered and long-biding Thule! Hardy mother of men, Thor grant thee life through the ages, After thy sad, sad past, may Happiness smile on thy future, And Liberty, won so late, crown every blessing with glory.’

  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.

  They saw scenes of thrilling horror, of majestic grandeur, and of heavenly beauty, where a more critical, perhaps more cultivated, taste would find more humble features, Burton decided. The landscape was the same, but the people had changed. The inhabitants were wiser, less superstitious; they no longer believed that Satan lurked at the bottom of the volcanoes, and for a fair wage, would take a tourist to the summit of almost anything, however sulphurous. The tourists had changed; they knew what to expect. They came with a dozen accounts swirling in their minds, of exploding springs, the land cracking into fire, the volcanoes spewing flames. A civilization in its childhood might be awed by the look of a place, Burton said, but a civilization as world-weary as the Victorians should seek out the useful in any land it came to, and try to harness the power of the nature it found.

  He was playing devil’s advocate, commanding the landscape to impress him, and his disdain seemed staged to me, a contrarian’s response. Mývatn was exotic, undeniably so. It was a landscape full of odd shapes and surprises, a landscape of anomaly, its every contour and gradation defying expectations. Nothing fitted, no line of hills seemed to lead to another, and the colours were always shifting. Covered with geothermal power stations and the signs of tourists, the landscape was not entirely wild as I walked back to the campsite, but it was certainly haunting in its variegated rocks and jarring colours. But there was something that interested me in Burton’s fury. It suggested a clash between expectation and reality. Burton expected travel to supply the exotic, the constantly arresting and extraordinary. When he lacked a superlative view, he lashed the landscape for its failure to astonish. When the weather was like domestic weather, wet and windy, Burton was enraged. Into the fantasy of a wild weird land came recalcitrant guides, thieving hosts, and the insistent fall of the rain, the mud splashing their legs.

  I knew that despite their best efforts, the Victorians had sometimes felt like this, as they struggled to keep a grip on their horses, finding their serge stuck to their legs, the rain soaking their bags, drenching their lunch, which was anyway a pile of mouldering cheese begged from a farmer in the previous valley. Trying to retreat back to a wild weird land, the Victorians found themselves sometimes cross and tired, tetchy with their guides. Even Morris occasionally rebelled, damning his guide, refusing to camp on a patch of festering bogland, and complaining about the uncomfortable back of his horse. In search of an Arcadia, they found a real country. It surprised and sometimes disappointed them, the moments when it was just a small, struggling land, full of people trying to make a living. They had wanted the lava to enthral them; they were hoping their travels through Thule would supply pure escapism. I understood it, even as I walked through the lava forest. Into the holiday bizarre, the vision of a former world, came daily trivia, logistics, or the mechanics of travel. I found a beautiful land, a land of low shrubs and rioting piles of stone, terrible sheer mountains, coils of soft mist with the sun refracted like a halo. I found thick, engulfing silence, as I stood at Mývatn at the end of the day, looking across the barren plain. I found the relentlessness of the rain, the cold evenings huddled in ascetic hotels, the walls vibrating as lorries ground along the road, a view of discarded oil containers dumped in the yard outside.

  Burton decided to leave the tattered old banner hanging above Iceland—keeping Ultima Thule, A Summer in Iceland as the title of his book. But he had removed the sense of exclamation to the phrase. Ultima Thule was something else to Burton: it was the real country of Iceland rather than a northern dreamworld.

  SILENCE

  HE KEPT UP HIS ‘ULTIMA THULE’ HABITS OF REFUSING INVITATIONS, SHIRKING INTRODUCTIONS; AND DECLINED INTO THIS ‘LET ME ALONE AND DON’T BOTHER ME STATE. . . .’

  ULTIMA THULE, BEING THE THIRD PART OF THE CHRONICLES OF THE FORTUNES OF RICHARD MAHONY, HENRY HANDEL RICHARDSON (PSEUDONYM OF ETHEL FLORENCE LINDESAY RICHARDSON, 1870-1946)

  When I was a teenager my
family spent holidays in the Lake District, travelling there each summer for two weeks in a stone cottage near Windermere. I pretended to hate it, sinking with feigned boredom into the car, complaining about the length of the journey. Secretly I was delighted; I swam in Lake Coniston, walked through Grisedale Forest and boated on Windermere. I watched the reflections of trees glistening on the clear waters of the lakes. I splashed into streams, swam against the cold current, drinking the water when it swilled into my mouth, clear cold water from the mountains. I camped in the garden of whatever small stone cottage we were renting that year, to listen to the sounds of the night stillness and the drum of rain on the roof of the tent. I would wake my brother early, and we would run across a field towards Windermere, to watch the wash from the speedboats slapping against the sand, to stand on the beaches staring out at the cloudy skies of summer.

  As we returned each year to the lakes, the landscape came to act as an aide-mémoire, each mountain and lake conjuring memories of former years, and I wondered what would happen in a landscape stripped of personal associations. I was an irreligious child, finding it impossible to believe in any force beyond the human, but I longed for some sort of intense experience, some epiphanic moment. For purely touristic reasons, I wanted to be struck by a sudden sense of a vast transcendent force, something overwhelming. I wanted to understand the sensation that seemed to have gripped most of the writers I enjoyed at the time: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and Clare. Finding nothing of the sort in churches or treatises, I wondered about pure pantheism, the rapturous contemplation of the creative spirit in nature—the spirit in the stones, divinity revealed in the breathing of the trees and so on. I wondered what would happen if I stood alone in empty space, looking at the vastness of the rocks. I remembered the fear instilled in me as a child by the shaking of trees in evening winds, as I stood ringing on the door of my parents’ house, having been dropped off by a friend’s parent in a car. I would glance along the street towards these forms, bowing and nodding in the wind, their branches seeming to reach towards me. Then the light of the doorway would extend towards me, I would be scooped into the warmth of the house, and the fear would fade.