Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

car. There are signs to the Dimmuborgir, which I’m sure weren’t there sixteen years ago, and then a car park and a visitors’ centre, which also wasn’t there. There are marked, roped trails through the lava, where Kathy and I wandered around sketching and pointing things out to each other, getting pleasurably disoriented as we couldn’t tell one clump of birch scrub, one stone giant, from another. But the children have no tolerance for wandering and getting lost, and the loos at the visitors’ centre are a good thing, and the groups of Spanish and German tourists, I remind myself, have as much right to be here as we do.

The Dimmuborgir are still strange. The furrows and caves of lava fields are familiar now, seem to me like the Icelandic version of the crazy-paving of fields and hedges that lighten the shoulders of expatriate Brits in holding patterns over Heathrow, the hallmark of home ground. But the Dimmuborgir are vertical, like melting sculptures and buildings, growing tall as houses out of ashy ground and birch scrub. They are black as tarmac, gravity-defying as Gothic stonework, shaped in a way that reminds me of edifices, of dinosaur skeletons, but remains abstract. One, Anthony points out, has a Norman arch. Another is a bit like a giant cactus. Trails wind around them, through low birch bushes filtering the sun. We have been collecting silences on this trip, and stand still to listen. Bees, midges. Birds. Other birds. Birch leaves, sensitive to the breeze. Laughter from the Spanish group who passed us earlier. Can we add it to the collection of silences? No. There is an underlying rumble, the same noise you hear on Saddleworth Moor from the M62 and high in Heiðmörk from Route 41 and on Bodmin Moor from the A30 It’s not, I know, reasonable to drive to a place and then resent the sound of traffic.

On, and up to Krafla. There’s more steam, some of it coming from the chimneys of a geothermal power station that bestrides the road like a medieval city gateway. Higher and higher, up a valley of desert sand and red mud, part-filled with a frozen river of black lava, and then it looks as if a giant has poured golf-course-green grass down the hillside, and there are sheep grazing, and then another lava spillage. Steam churns from every pore in the ground. The car park at the top is almost full, and there’s a queue at the coffee booth and another at the loos, and when we get out we hear the roar again, louder and lower because we’re closer to it than we were in the Dimmuborgir. It’s not traffic but the ground, the rumble of the planet’s rumination.

We set off, across a meadow of crowberries, over turf a brighter green than elsewhere and studded with harebells and gentians, towards the steam and sand. From up here, more mountains come up, and more, rising out of a fjord that is filled with black lava, not blue sea. My brain reads the landscape as water and mountains, with islands in the fjord, very much like what we saw in Eyjafjörður, but it’s not water. We cross the lava flow, like walking across a runway or a motorway between the meadow and the boiling mud, and then take the path around the volcano’s cone, towards a smaller crater. The wind is sharp up here and Tobias and I have cold hands. We hold them in the steam, happy to find that, unlike at Hveragerði in winter, it’s hot enough to help, and then Tobias discovers that the rock is warm to the touch. He lies down on it, pleased. The stone feels like unglazed stoneware, and has the warmth and roughness of hefty pots waiting to be glazed. I put my hand into a crack in the rock, a few inches wide, and steam condenses on it immediately. It’s toaster rock, says Tobias, and starts trying to put other things down it. A piece of paper comes out wet. He drops a piece of lava down the crack and becomes convinced that he’s made it steam more, and then we all start playing with the toaster rocks, warming our hands, wondering what we could cook, poking it with stones. Tobias suggests that if he takes some back to Cornwall and drops it down a hole, steam will start to come out there too, and begins to imagine his friends’ pleasure at this discovery in the school playground. The crater above us looks like pictures of the mouth of hell, a gaping hole with human figures obscured by billowing steam. We follow the path to the top, where there is a formation of rocks in something like sandstone, vaguely reminiscent of a Barbara Hepworth and bearing no apparent relation to the lava or the sand. It’s like standing on the mountain’s prow, overhanging the inland sea of black lava, the fertile plains around the lake and the sulphurous steam still rising from the crater, which erupted about the same time as the birth of Christ.

On the last day, we go as far north as possible, to the edge of the island. Akureyri is at the foot of the Tröllaskagi peninsula, and a new tarmac road runs all the way around the edge, to the towns of Dalvík, Ólafsfjörður and Siglufjörður. Ólafsfjörður and Siglufjörður, separated by two headlands with multiple peaks almost a kilometre high, are linked by two tunnels that were finished last year. Before that, I guess, poring over the map, the quickest way in and out was probably by boat. Weather permitting. There was no road at all into Siglufjörður until 1967, only a mountain pass open for a few weeks most summers. Guy, who’s enjoying the madness of Icelandic roads, is eager to go through the tunnels. I, mindful that so far all the fears about Icelandic health and safety that I tried to dismiss as paranoia have been justified by