Fairytales were played out in rustic places, dark forests, country villages, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which I loved as a child, was a mournful pastoral lament, creating an idealized Europe of green meadows and rushing mountain rivers, where small hob-bits lived in holes in the ground, and tree herders spoke, and the enemy came as a technocrat, damming rivers and waging wars. There were dozens of gentle idylls in children’s books: the Swallows and Amazons camping in the dales, their imaginations as rich as the view, naming the rocks after legendary mountains, finding treasure islands and pirates. Narnia was the unchanging forest, the Arcadia in the cupboard, or in the attic of the city house. There were darker Arcadias: the warped pastorals of the Susan Cooper books, which had been my favourites for a time, with their Arthurian world where pagan festivals bred surreal dreams—in one of the most febrile of the books a wicker figure thrown into the sea appears in a vision to one of the children.
In these books the fictional worlds were beyond the grasp of adults, except the occasional enlightened guardian, who understood the secret and turned out anyway to be a reincarnation of Merlin. They were gently didactic, adult writers trying to explain to children that later they might lose the ability to imagine themselves away from reality, or they would no longer have the time to. Later they would be forced to distinguish between the actual and the created; it would be a necessary part of their commitment to the world, distinguishing the plausible and rational from the insane, the eccentric, and the unfortunate. The rural Arcadias represented a state of innocence, a time when the individual could live free of the fetters of society, innocent of the realities of adulthood. The realm of experience—the world of adults, where rules were imposed on the imagination—was intertwined symbolically with the city. It was like the world of William Blake, in Songs of Innocence and Experience, which I read as a teenager—poems that pretended to be songs for children, but which spelt out the division between Arcadia and society in rustic images. Blake saw the country-city division less as a question of physical location and more as high symbolism, a supreme expression of the battle of the human spirit against the restrictions of society. For Blake, the countryside was less the place for a pleasing picnic and more a symbol of freedom from the fetters of convention, from the stultifying effects of orthodoxy, represented by ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ of the city. The Songs of Innocence and Experience divided the life of the spirit into states of freedom from social restrictions—states of innocence—and states of subjection—states of experience. London was where the individual was enslaved, ‘bound with briars.’ Emptiness and silence were freedom because they were devoid of the clamour of other voices telling you how to behave, what not to do, what to be.
After childhood, I moved only from city to city, moving throughout my twenties from London to New York, to Paris, to Berlin, to Oslo, to London again. I was propelled by an obsessive urge to experience novelties: new places, new cities. For nearly a decade, I was unable to stay in any one place for more than a few months. I became addicted to the absolution of the aeroplane, the interim state of nothingness a mile above the sea, and the immediate immersion in a new environment at the other end of the flight, the mundane made interesting by virtue of its foreignness. I went from New York—stark skyscrapers, glass and concrete, the constant motion of cars beneath—to London, a riot of styles, representing a course of urban history, buildings built, ruined, burned, bombed, reconstructed; hills which had become estates; pastoral glades transformed into yuppie suburbs, the spirit of the place so Protean as to be crazed and schizophrenic. From London to Paris to Berlin to Oslo. The cities varied in endlessness—for relentless suburban sprawl London licked competitors; every sketchy parade of shops which seemed like the end of the city would be followed by another bank of interwar houses. Every year I was forced by a sense of pressure behind the forehead back to London, and then I would leave again shortly afterwards.
The city always drew me back, a city in one country or another. I was compelled by the show, the constant motion, the bizarre energies of colliding humans, crammed together in a lunatic experiment. Every sound represented a technology of the last century—the grinding of cars, the soprano whine of the plane engines, falling towards Heathrow, the bleeping of pedestrian crossings, the scream of burglar alarms, the sounds of stereos, pumping a bass-beat through car windows, through the walls of Victorian houses, never meant to withstand insistent thumping drum and bass. In a flat overlooking the Westway and the Hammersmith and City line, I watched the empty carriages, lit against the darkness, pulling into the station.
During a long humid summer in New York the whirr of the air conditioning unit had kept me awake for hours at night, and my thoughts had fluttered and twirled before resting on images of whiteness, vast plains of white ice, stretching limitlessly into the distance. I would doze, and the air conditioning unit would become a fresh Arctic breeze, blasting into my face, as I imagined a long, low plain of ice.
These were gaps in the old myth of Thule, the parts that remained uncertain through the centuries: just how far north Thule was, whether the sea had been frozen or sluggish, whether there had been midnight sun for months or just at the height of summer, whether the land was inhabited or empty, whether Thule was an island or not. These gaps meant that Thule could be formed and reformed, depending on your anxieties and predilections. Depending on what an Arcadia meant to you. It was a myth that could be made to fit, tailored and snipped at the edges, parts of it swept away, thrown in a cupboard, other parts cut in bright colours.
You could reinvent Thule whenever you felt a former Thule had faded, become tarnished. Even as Burton announced the loss of awe, kicking away the previous travellers, who were left fawning on the lava, his gaze turned towards the vast and ancient ice cap in the south. Despite his scepticism, he found he wasn’t ready to leave Iceland. After Mývatn Burton carried on around the island, trotting on horseback across the lava deserts, staring ferociously at the view. He found there was something he liked, an element which compelled him: the silence of the plains, the ice spreading across the tops of the mountains, concealing ancient rocks. There was a silent glacier in the south of Iceland, a huge white blot not even mapped in 1872, an ice cap called Vatnajökull. A few years after Burton left, a determined man called William Watts crossed the glacier, travelling northwards from Núpstaður to Reykjahlið. Watts wrote later about ‘the expanse of snow, losing itself in the northern distance; pure, silent, dazzling, beautiful, and spotless, save where a few black peaks and uncouth masses of dark rock protruded through the frozen covering.’ It was a realistic sublime: the glacier was beautiful and spotless; the ice fields of Iceland, looming above the blistered plains and the curdled pools, supplied a sense of ancient space. It was a Thule of silence, a Thule of magnificent mountains and cold glaciers. A deep-time Thule, the indifferent ages revealed in nature, in the vast and implacable ice.
There’s a ragged dust track leading to Vatnajökull which runs along the coast, weaving around the edges of the fjords. It passes cairns and stunted trees clinging to the dust, leaving the orange sand plains of Mývatn and passing into the monochrome mountains of the coast and the mist-shrouded plains. Cone mountains stand silhouetted against the darkening skies. In places the road is a rock track, hurling up pebbles as it passes through a lava field, the moss bright against the sand and the lava disappearing into a soft valley of low hills. The clouds are dark, hovering low above the mountains. A sign by the road says: DWELL IN A TURF COTTAGE LIKE THE OLD ICELANDIC VIKINGS DID!—but there is no trace of a cottage, or any directions to one. The sign stands, like a random lifestyle suggestion in the wilderness. The road runs across a river, into a terrain of rain-drenched hills and snow-capped mountains. The lava plains recede, and the mountainsides are green. A great plume of mist moves across the mountains ahead, drifting along the valley floor.
The white fog lies like wool on the ground, as I travel around the coast towards the south. The scree mountains disappear into
the whiteness. The mountains tower above the concrete bunker houses. The road winds in an intricate pattern round the fjords, through green valleys, with birch trees and shrubs. The sea is white under a lingering mist; low rocky islands appear dimly off the shore. The basalt sides of the rocks have been carved into sharp columns and gullies by the pressure of ancient ice. The gradient sharpens, lifting the road into the cloud and rain; the bus passes into blankness.
Basalt chimneys disappear into the mist. At the coast, odd lonely rock formations emerge out of water, their sides rising steeply, speckled with moss. The mountains are divided into rugged shelves, which run horizontally along the rock faces. Everything is tinged with white mist shadow, thickening as it drifts up the sides of the mountains like smoke. In the south, around the town of Höfn, a junction for buses and four-wheel drives, the glacier tongues appear between the snow-covered mountains, lolling down the gorges, sending out a brilliant white glow.
In the languid summer evenings, Iceland is a nature church, with everyone bowing to the scenery. There’s a cult of silence in contemporary Iceland, a cult of pure white plains and unpopulated mountains. Contemporary travellers turn to the astonishing emptiness of the interior, the riveting loveliness of the valleys, the peacefulness. Everyone is driving around Iceland in four-wheel drives, trying to get away from it all. Sometimes they drive towards the interior, bouncing their tyres on the rocks. But mostly they circle the island. The roads are never crowded. Only at the pit stops, the small towns, can you see the other tourists. And whenever we stop and talk to each other, we all say the same thing: the nature, the nature is so beautiful, so empty. We like the long shadows falling across the iridescent moss, the pewter lakes, the slow dying of the sun. Beautiful, we agree, and then we all climb back into our jeeps and continue on this quest for stillness. It is an anti-social impulse; the scenes we prefer are the mountains stripped of other people, the roads free of cars. This cult of silence understands purity as a plain white space, a space without the contaminating presence of other worshippers. A few we accept, a few hushed voices on the side of a glacier, a few demure trekkers nodding apologetically on a cliff face. But the hordes are antithetical to the stillness, so everyone is quick to leave the pit stops, filling up their four-wheel drives and taking off again into the silence.
In the phosphorescent morning sky, the cars move past the ice. The ice is piled high like a wall, stacked above the lava ground. At the base of the glaciers, the land is covered with pointed dunes of grey dust and moss. At the glacial lagoon of Jökulsárlón all the buses stop, and we all emerge into the frozen silence of the glacier pool. There are dozens of buses there, hundreds of tourists clutching cups of tea, but they fade into the background and the view is all ice—enormous chunks, patterned with dirt, like vast chunks of liquorice, striped black and white and blue. The bergs glisten as they move, slowly, towards the ocean. The sky is pale; everything seems blanched by the ice. The mountains stand behind; the glacier merges with the whiteness of the sky. Hundreds of terns circle around the river’s edge. The bergs are stained with colours and reflected on the clear water, every berg ghosted by its mirror image. There are tour guides, saying that the view is transient; the glacier is retreating, causing the shoreline to erode, threatening the bridge. One day the road may pass this spot, and all the ice will have gone, they say. Everyone directs a camera at the ice, trying to preserve the place in holiday photographs.
I stand at the edge of the lagoon, sipping tea, watching the bergs twist slowly in the water.
After the glacial lagoon, the tourists seemed to vanish. The wilderness trekking centre at Vatnajökull was almost deserted. ‘Be-sides, ’ said the manager, ‘it has rained solidly for five days, so the tents have all been packed away, and the four-wheel drives have driven off.’ He told me to camp anywhere. ‘Everywhere is wet, it doesn’t really matter where,’ he added. Five days of torrential rain had swept across the valley, soaking the moraine sands, turning everything to mud. I picked a path through the lower valley, and dumped my bags on a patch of grass, where they sank slightly into the spongy sand. Delaying the moment when I would have to fumble with the tent poles, greasing my hands with mud, I left everything in a dirty pile and walked towards the glacier. The glacier was compelling: it had left debris across the plain, and it absorbed the sky, spreading across the whiteness. From the wilderness trekking centre I could see only a fraction of the mass of ice, and this fraction stretched for miles. I found no one on the paths as I passed a farm perched on the edge of a cliff and clambered over the sodden ground towards a dirty glacial tongue and a long white river. The mist was closing around the rocks. The rain began to fall again as I descended along a long ridge, with the glacial tongue of Skaftafellsjökull visible below. There were vast ridges in the ice, coloured a greasy grey, and grey lines like shadows beneath waves, successive ice waves. I took a detour off the path and walked through wet marshes until I was soaked, fording rivers, losing the way.
At the base of the mountain, I walked to the edge of the glacier, where it declined onto the mud plains. The wind was whipping across the valley. The stones and rocks on the wet sand were shattered; some had been smashed, others sliced into neat pieces, like a cake. I crossed a fast-flowing stream and boarded the glacier at a point at which the ice had reared up, showing a rough underbelly coated in pebbles. The ice was like crystal buried under layers of rubble; I rubbed off some of the upper dirt and rocks, revealing the clearness of the ice beneath it. Clambering over a dirt pile I reached the sliding surface of the glacier, which was streaked a slate-grey. I felt a sense of a great gap—the white depths beneath the ice, and the height of the white ice towering behind me. I heard a low groaning sound from far within the ice. A river emerged from the side of the glacier: a torrent which suddenly calmed and disappeared again further down. And it was not so much fear that I felt, or any sense of pending danger, or any sense of the absolute; it was more a sense of incongruity, the sensation which suddenly hits you when you swim in deep-sea waters, and you imagine the bottomless depths far beneath your small, dangling legs. The glacier was vast and ancient, moving slowly backwards, leaving a trail of shattered rocks behind. It emitted a chill, a force field of impenetrable age. Beneath it were hidden lakes, torrents of water, and resting volcanoes.
Burton never arrived at the glacier; he only glimpsed the ice, and the view alone caused him a moment of hushed reverence, a significant volte-face. It was a dream landscape, he wrote. Beyond the long white wave, ermine above and below spotted like a Danish dog, two blue buttresses rose to the east, with a light-blue glacier spreading across the snowfields lying at the base. The sun was sinking as he watched the ice; the horizon rained light. He lurched into a last flourish, putting on his holiday baroque: ‘the opaline play of the projections and prominences which catch the lights, the faint pink-azure of the shades, and the sky-larking of the cloud-hosts over the heads of the tallest peaks, set off by the umbreous black foreground, dull and sodden, by the beggarly features of the middle distance, and by the wash of deep damascene blue at the base, fall into glorious picture; and the presence of black spots suggest the haunts of some Troll-like race—I no longer wondered that there are superstitions about this mysterious realm of eternal snow.’ Burton returned to the ship he had arrived on, steaming back to Britain, mollified by the glimpse of empty ice. At Vatnajökull, he had found something unusual, exotic in its stillness, worth the trip, worth the long crossing home. Because of this stretching silent ice, Iceland remained a Thule of sorts, thought Burton, a pure northern Arcadia, worthy of a few superstitions. The emptiness still allowed for pensive dreaming, moments of restful contemplation. It was a change of perspective: the wild weirdness of the land was less to be found in the exploding springs and the volcanoes and more in the properties of this silence, spreading across the mountains.
The ice haunted visitors, causing them to glance behind them, uncomfortable in the silence, in the empty ice-plains. The silence and the stones, the br
illiant shades of the sand mountains, the swirling clouds of mist at the edges of the sea. There was grace and urgency, impressive force in the howl of gales, the rush of torrents, the roar of waterfalls, when the sea looked like cast iron, when the sky was charged with rolling clouds torn to shreds, when mists unfolded over the lowlands and when the tall peaks faded out of focus. I rested in the silence of the ice cap, loafing around at the edge for a few hours, watching a few straggling trekkers emerge along the path and stare at the ice-tongue for a while. As the evening rains began to fall onto the ice, I picked up my pack, and walked back towards the camp. Sheets of rain were slicing along the valley by the time I found my sodden bags. I stood under the canopy of the trekking centre, which had closed its doors for the evening, watching the moraine sands darken under the flood of rain.
W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice came for the silence. They wanted nothing more, the exploding springs and volcanic eruptions hardly interested them. The poets travelled through Iceland in the 1930s, laughing quietly at the excesses of the Victorians, enjoying only the emptiness, refusing the rest. They were young—Auden was twenty-nine—kicking against the conservatism of their nation, but wary of world events, of the rise of Nazism in Germany, the biting political winds. A pair of poets, trotting delicately across the cracked plains: MacNeice in a long black raincoat and a peaked hat which he wore backwards, staring sullenly at the camera; Auden taking photographs. Auden had managed to persuade Faber to sponsor the trip, but he found himself suffering from writer’s block. He had no idea at first what he would write or how he would write it. Fortunately, he had read Byron’s Don Juan on the boat to Iceland, so he wrote letters to Byron in the style of Don Juan, his stanzas littered with hilarious rhymes. Auden and MacNeice found nothing but a thin unreal sun lighting the lava, simplicity like a spa cure. A consoling nothingness, devoid of great visions, or disconcerting signs from God, or moments of illumination.
The Ice Museum Page 12