The Ice Museum (13 page)

Later Burton, Morris, Trollope, Mrs. Tweedie rode out, enticed by tales of water hurled two hundred feet high, accompanied by an immense rumbling under the earth. They trotted out from Reykjavík on horseback, jolting on the rocks. They had read the ecstatic reports of Hooker and Mackenzie and the other earlier travellers. They knew the place was renowned for weirdness, for the surprising effects of blasting water. So they stopped off at Geysir, expecting to be startled out of their wits.

No one camps on the geysir field any more, though a campsite further down the road was half full of sodden tents. The tourists lined their cars up outside the Geysir Hotel and the Great Geysir lurked, inactive. Centuries of pressure under the earth had created a large bunion of rock around the pool, but the waters were still. There was a smaller geysir, called Strokkur, still doing a regular turn as I stood under the drifting smoke clouds. On Independence Day, like an ancient primadonna, the geysir is dragged on stage to perform its former turn. In honour of the Icelandic nation, it is coaxed. A reluctant patriot, it lies sullen until tonnes of soap flakes have been hurled into its depths, and then, rumbling as if to say, oh, if you insist, it produces the spectacle: a thundering under the earth, a retching expulsion of steam and water, and a sputtering anti-climax as the waters dwindle to calmness again. The Icelanders used to spit into the geysir holes, thinking that way they spat at the devil, but now they work in the gift shop selling burgers and postcards, while the tourists peer cautiously into the geysir pools. I watched the bubbling of the water, gentle at first, then rising and falling with greater intensity, until the water formed into a viscous film, like an immense furious jellyfish, puffed out with the force of a powerful current. The water was suddenly sucked down, then with a belching groan the geysir exploded—a cloud of water and steam, sending everyone racing backwards clutching their video cameras.

Standing at the field, the practical Mrs. Alec Tweedie experienced a moment of dismay; the Great Geysir would not play, she wrote, as if it was a famous violinist struck by shyness. To our great mortification, she added, it failed to play at all throughout the visit. Strokkur, the more obliging soloist geysir, was filled with earth sods, which it duly vomited in a cloud of steam. Richard Burton was unimpressed, standing by the dank and unexploding pool of water. ‘Throwing stones at it works, firing a gun stops it boiling,' wrote Burton. He failed to see much interest in the occasional explosions. ‘I cannot but hold the geysirs to be gross humbugs,' he added. He had seen a shiver and a general bubble, half veiled in white vapour, which rose like a gigantic glass shade from the still surface, and then trickled down the basin sides. He gave it a long inspection, and wrote the details into his diary, sniffing the sulphur fumes, finding the smell like rotten eggs, and deciding it was just a poor beginning, and greater wonders would soon emerge.

Tweedie and Burton and Morris trotted off, in search of something still stranger, the women teetering side-saddle on their horses, in line with social decorum, the men shouting orders at their guides. Not bad, they all agreed, exploding water, rather interesting, rather strange. But they wanted wild weirdness, in the manner of the verse, in the manner of all the old dreams of the north, the ‘other world' of Thule. Their horses bucked over the stones, nearly tipping the women off, in line with convention. Tweedie was astride her horse, defiantly trotting off with the men. Burton was riding ahead of the pack, finding their pace too slow, accustomed as he was to galloping across the desert. Things were sure to be slightly stranger in Thingvellir, they thought, and if they weren't, they had heard startling stories about the lava plains in the north and the spectral waters of Lake Mývatn.

As I stood there, the smaller geysir was firing well, regularly racing up to its climax, interspersing real explosions with a few feints—bubbles boiling in the pool, looking like they might explode then subsiding with a wheeze. I lingered at Geysir for an afternoon, watching a few more explosions. The four-wheel drives sat in the rain outside the Geysir Hotel, and the restaurant with a view of the plain was full. I stood for a while in the Geysir Museum, watching films of lava bursting through rocks. Then I drove out of the rain-drenched town.

I drove through dense shrubland across a mountain pass. The road wound along stubby fields, and the car bounced on rocks. I could see the plain of Thingvellir, the valley of the first Icelandic Parliament. A grey-green meadow in the distance, stretching towards a glassy lake with pointed islets. A pale white line of light illuminated the valley, showing the seamed face of the land, and the dusky foliage of the birch wood beyond the region of the rifts. The mountains stretched away—Armannsfell, looming against the dank clouds, Lagafell, the long jagged line of Tindaskagi, and lurking in the distance the white mass of Skjaldbreiður. The hills were gaudy in the spectral sunlight, set against the pale lake.

The Victorians walked through the chasm to reach the plain of Thingvellir, descending along a small, steep, dangerous path, across large fragments of lava. They walked beneath colossal blocks of stone, lofty walls, uncertain and slightly disturbed. Here, they hoped, was the centre of the weird land, the ancient land of Thule, the ghastly sublime they had sought—approached through a deep fissure called Almannagjá, fire rocks blasted by successive eruptions.

The early inhabitants of this cracked land were the Vikings, and the nineteenth-century travellers poured into the valley clutching
The Prose or Younger Edda, Popular Tales from the Norse, The Saga of Burnt Njal
, translations from the Icelandic Sagas. The Vikings were arriving in Iceland from the 860s onwards. An early arrival was Naddod the Viking, who was driven onto the coast by winds. When he was sailing away he saw a snowstorm ripping across the mountains, so he called the island Snowland. Gardar the Swede arrived around the same time, modestly calling the island Gardarsholm. Floki came slightly later, with three ravens, which he hurled off the ship to show him the way towards land. He sailed along the coast of Iceland, and eventually landed at Vatnsfjord. The winter and spring were cold and when Floki climbed a mountain he saw the fjord full of sea ice. He called the country Iceland.

Iceland was an unclaimed, unregulated place, a place to start a new society in. Anything could be imagined, anything created, the Vikings thought, as they arrived from the western fjords of Norway: ships full of opportunists, the intrepid, the bored, the exiled, risking the journey to another place. Some fled the draconian attentions of King Harald Fairhair, who was whiling away the late ninth century trying to control the Norwegian landowners. By the thirteenth century, the
Historia Norvegiae
described the great island ‘which by the Italians is called Ultima Tile,' inhabited by a multitude of people, ‘while formerly it was wasteland, and unknown to men, until the time of Harald Fairhair.'

Ketil Flat-nose and family made a typical retreat, which was etched out in one of the Sagas. Ketil Flat-nose came from a prominent, powerful family in western Norway. When he learned that King Harald Fairhair was expecting him to submit absolutely to kingly authority, without receiving any compensation for kinsmen killed by the king's forces, he decided to leave the country. There was little honour to be gained by sitting at home waiting for King Harald's henchmen to chase him from his lands, Flat-nose decided. His sons had heard good things about Iceland: it was a country where land was available and there were always whales off the coast and salmon in the rivers, they said. The sons set out for Iceland the same summer, landing in the west, though Flat-nose, who did not want to spend his dotage on a fish-farm, set out for Scotland. After landing in Scotland, Flat-nose immediately set about plundering and pillaging, and then made peace with the Scots and, so the story goes, was given half the kingdom of Scotland. Some of his family went to the Orkney and Faroe Islands, and eventually his daughter Unn the Deep-minded set off to find her brothers in Iceland. The Saga about Flat-nose and his children ended with one of those lists of descendants the Vikings loved, running away through the generations: ‘Alf's daughter was Thorgerd, the wife of Ari Masson. . . . His father, Mar, was the son of Atli, son of Ulf the Squinter and Bjorg Eyvindardottir. . . .' These Vikings had names to make legends of, names like Grimsson Red-cloak, son of Grim Ketilsson Hairy-cheeks, Asbjorn the Fleshy, Ragnar Shaggy-breeches, Asgeir Audunarson Scatter-brain, Audun the Uninspired (a poet), Thord Snorrason Horse-head, Eyvind the Plagiarist (a poet), Eyvind the Proud, Hrolf the Walker, Thorbjorg the Little Prophetess, Hall Styrsson, son of Killer-Styr, Sarcastic Halli (a poet), Sigtrygg Silk-beard, Finn the Squinter, Thorbjorg Gilsdottir Ship-breast, Hallfred the Troublesome (a poet), Ref Steinsson the Sly, Groa Dala-Kollsdottir, mother of Bersi the Dueller, Hallbjorn Half-troll, Ketil the Slayer, An Bow-bender, Thorhalla Chatterbox, Odd the Hermit, Eirik the All-wise, Thorbjorn the Pock-marked, Thorir Ingimundarson Goat-thigh.

At first there was no ruler of the Viking retreat, no administrative centre; the new arrivals stayed on their farms, among the vast flat plains. In 930 a legislative body of important men was created, and Thingvellir was where the settlers gathered, for the meetings of the Althing, the National Assembly. The word recurred across the Viking Empire: in the Tingvold of Norway, the Dingwall of Ross-shire, the Tingwall of Hjaltland and the Tynwald of Dumfries and the Isle of Man. Imagination amplified the uncanny sunsets, the shadows lengthening over the dark plains, and in the Sagas the nuances of legal process mingle with breathy tales of trolls, ghosts, berserks and enchantments. The Vikings had travelled far, they knew the Anglo-Saxon world; their writers knew the works of Bede, St. Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great, Alcuin. In the long winter nights, they told stories; they had many stories to tell. The silent grandeur of the plain at Thingvellir reproached later Icelanders, as the country turned to corruption, and they idealised the past, compiling Sagas and early stories, writing out the Norse myths.

The Icelandic painter Thorlaksson painted Thingvellir in 1900 as a place of rich greys and blues, the mountains reflected on the surface of the lake, a solitary horse in the foreground, staring beyond the frame. An iconic image: the bizarre semi-hostile nature, the semi-wild animals, and the empty silence, as the sky swirls over the dark mountains. In Iceland in 1900 there was no need to paint nature pink, or gold, as Man Ray would later paint forests. The emptiness of the Icelandic landscape hardly called for ironies of paint. There was no need for the blurred visions of Monet and the Impressionists, objects perceived through a haze of light and dust, the snapshot portraits of Toulouse-Lautrec, the fractured images of Picasso and Braque. Thingvellir in 1900 was stark and unrefined—a place of black rifts and pallid lakes, lit by a trembling sun.

It was the same as I stared across the plain. A plain driven through with a dark chasm, caused by the clash of tectonic plates. The plain was silent, except for the sound of cars leaving the car park, their tyres skimming on the wet road. There were a few tourists wandering the slippery trails, peering into the chasms, pausing on the wooden bridges to look at the silver river.

I stood on the plain flanked by deep rifts, gullies in the yielding turf. The river Öxará meandered across, spilling out muddy streams. The lake of Thingvallavatn glinted in the cold afternoon sunlight. It was a strange valley, there was something haughty about its windswept stretches, its indifference to the comfort of its visitors. The paths I walked were wet with fresh mud, and the rain fell harder, sending up a cloud of spray from the lake. The plain was spartan and mysterious; there were a few signs stuck into the mud, signalling the place where malefactors were drowned, or the place where the visitors built their booths, protecting themselves from the swift rain sweeping through the valley. I stood on a bridge over the glistening river watching the rain splash on the surface of the water. The scenery wore the dampness well, the dark rocks were slick with wetness and heavy clouds scudded across the sky.

There was Anthony Trollope, visiting Thingvellir on a tourist trip in the 1870s. With his hosts Mr. and Mrs. John Burns, and the other travellers—Admiral Ryder, Admiral Farquhar and Mrs. H. Blackburn—he rode on horseback across the plain. They had more horses in line behind them, carrying their provisions, which they had brought with them from Scotland, not trusting the local food. Down the rifts in the rock he and his group peered, seeing black deep water at the bottom, ‘almost infernal to be looked upon,' Trollope shuddered. Mysterious and violent, he muttered. The blasted fields of Iceland were too much for his party; Mrs. Burns his hostess discovered at Thingvellir that she could hardly go any further, her horse had proved uncomfortable, the heat and labour too great, and the bother of riding side-saddle had quite finished her. She slipped from the pony, sweating, apologizing to the party, longing to go to sleep in a bed, she confessed. But they had to sleep in the church at Thingvellir, the women lying on the steps around the Communion table, walled off from the men by a little rail, and the men down the nave, like memorial tablets. They tried to be jovial, but everyone had a curious night, sleeping by the altar of the small wooden church. Waking to find the moon glinting on the Communion silver, casting an ethereal light across the pews. Subterranean heat, eruptions, an ill-omened look to the place, wrote Trollope, who enjoyed a blackened sky and a thick ominous sunset.

At Thingvellir, the nineteenth-century travellers stood, as the tourists stand today, at the Hill of Laws, Lögberg—‘the heart of Iceland, ' ‘the greatest marvel,' wrote William Morris. It was Morris I was thinking of, as I walked towards the Hill of Laws, where the Speaker of Laws stood, his voice echoing off the rocks of Almannagjá, reverberating back into the valley from the sides of the chasm. For Morris, the landscape of Iceland was the last link to the world of the Icelandic Sagas. At Thingvellir he was quite ecstatic, writing in his rain-splashed diary as the storm dripped onto his hat, and refusing to go into the church because he was having a sudden and perfect vision of Ref the Sly. Morris wandered around, the rain soaking through his hat, thinking about the Vikings. Fantastically intrigued by the Vikings, seeing phantoms, his imagination transforming the plains. If he came to a patch of marshland, roughly in the right place, he thought that here Thorolf Dark-skin, who had been stealing livestock and offering up both men and animals, had sat down in the swamp and wept, because he saw his enemies were going to kill him. Jokul son of Ingimund had followed him there, to this piece of marshy ground Morris had just arrived at, and it was here or roughly hereabouts, he imagined, that Jokul said to Thorolf Dark-skin that he was a great monster and a villain without courage. Here, Morris suspected, Jokul dealt the death blow and Thorolf Dark-skin sank into the marsh. Here was the place where Njal the lawyer stood stoically awaiting his nemesis, and where Osvif lived, the son of Helgi son of Ottar son of Bjorn the Easterner son of Ketil Flat-nose son of Bjorn Buna, and this was where Gudrun did the washing, the most beautiful woman to have lived in Iceland.