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

that it’s near a glacier and could trigger a flood, and the real worry is that every time this one blows, Katla follows. And Katla offers ash plumes into international airspace, ash over most of the country and a lot of toxic gas. You’d be able to see that all right.

But four days later, the roads are reopened and the tour companies begin to advertise ‘volcano trips’ on the internet. It’s still being called ‘a tourist eruption’, as if Icelanders themselves are so used to molten lava bursting over the horizon that they don’t bother to glance up and it’s only foreigners who feel the need to go and watch. I book a ticket. Max wants to come too. We won’t be back until after midnight, but a live volcano seems worth a late night.

The bus will collect us from the Hilton. It’s a useful landmark, on the corner of a big intersection, but I’ve never been inside before. We sit on a leather sofa and wait, watching the expressions of people coming in from their first taste of Iceland. Suitcases hurry like dogs at the heels of their well-heeled owners. People in dark clothes and sunglasses queue for the attention of two young women, blonde and made up like air-hostesses, behind a hardwood counter. The faces coming and going in the revolving door are uncertain, as if they’re coming to apply for citizenship rather than check in. The lobby is built on the scale of a parliament or national museum, diminishing guests to insect-size.

The bus comes. I’d been hoping for one of the mini-buses we see sometimes heading out of the city with foreigners craning through tinted windows at Esja and the unused pavements and concrete apartment blocks of Reykjavík, but it’s a full-sized coach, emblazoned with the tour company’s logo. All year, I’ve been seeing these buses with envy for people who can look at Iceland and go home, uncompromised, pity for those who don’t learn the changing moods of light and water, and, latterly, a little superiority to those who take home a tour-guide’s narrative of Icelandic life. We climb the stairs and choose seats, and then sit there for an hour while the bus circles the city, picking up further passengers from hotels by a route that makes a maze of the ring roads, only to return to the main drag where everyone is instructed to leave the bus and exchange one kind of ticket for another. An hour and a half after Max and I boarded, we leave the city via Route 1, passing the Hilton on the way. Max and I open our books and lean back, but the tour guide starts to talk, over a PA system too loud for reading. Max puts his fingers in his ears and holds the book with his elbows. The tour guide tells us that the sagas are historically accurate, that all modern Icelanders descend from those who came from Norway in the ninth century and that Iceland has been a full democracy since the settlement era. No mention of the settlers’ Irish and Scottish slaves, much less more recent immigrants. It’s a clear day, the sun moving into the west over rush hour on Route 1. We pass the industrial parks and retail zones surging east from the suburbs, bits of heath and lava still asserting themselves between the car parks and warehouses. There are two British women behind me; after nine months in Iceland I want to turn and introduce myself but instead I hold my book open and eavesdrop, one of the pleasures I’ve missed most here. They’ve spent the last three days taking coach tours out of Reykjavík and have heard the same spiel on each one. The fat blonde repeats phrases after the tour guide, making fun of her accent and mispronunciations. I watch the reflection of the thin brunette staring out of the window, jeeps flickering past her face, until she turns to her companion and tells her to stop being so fucking miserable all the time. I wonder how long she’s been wanting to say that. The fat blonde’s indifferent response suggests this isn’t the first time, and after the traffic lights change she starts up again. The tour guide is explaining that Iceland was actually responsible for the French Revolution. (I’ve heard this argument before, though only in Iceland; the poor harvests that exacerbated European hardship in 1796 may have been affected by an ash cloud from Katla.) One of the couple opposite us is reading a novel in Polish with American place names, the other the Lonely Planet Guide to Iceland in English. The guide begins to list the dates of every volcanic eruption in Icelandic history and Max, who likes that kind of thing, lets his book close. We come down the hill into Hveragerði, where steam is still rising from the places where steam rises. The guide tells us that before the earthquake in 2007, there was no steam here. If that’s true, I think, they worked damn fast to set up a tourist trail as soon as the earth stopped moving. Which is entirely plausible.

Through Selfoss, and out, south now of our known world. It’s the first time I see that some of the land outside Reykjavík, which is often described as more or less empty by city-dwellers, has a scattering of farms at least as dense as in Kent. This isn’t wilderness. The fields are bigger and flatter than at home, and the mountains looming over them and the colours in the winter grass and the tilted sky don’t look like anywhere else I’ve been, but the houses and barns, the horses and ditches, could be in Belgium or northern France. I wanted the strangeness I’ve seen in the films and that I remember from my summer with Kathy, I wanted flame rolling from a lunar landscape, not red-roofed barns and a flow of traffic suggestive of a bank holiday in Cornwall. There are