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

same underground source as Katla, has been followed by Katla within two years. We’ve all been given notice. I haven’t met an Icelander who’s much troubled by the prospect.

‘Honestly, I think if we hadn’t read about it because of the air traffic being disrupted, we wouldn’t have known anything about this volcano here. Nothing looks different. But I had a family from Lebanon – Lebanon – who stayed with us at Christmas last year send me a card: “Our thoughts and prayers are with you.” Er – thanks!’

‘I suppose it’s awful for the farmers, though,’ I add. There are some farms too close to the volcano.

‘Yeah, well,’ says Brynja, gathering her coat. ‘If you take a farm in the path of an active volcano, you kind of know what’s going to happen. It’s when, not if. Shall we take a walk?’

We go out into the rain. A lorry sweeps along Route 1, past the wooden watchtowers, with a sail of spray behind it. Low cloud hangs in front of the hill above the house. Brynja points out the hermit’s rock, a truck-sized boulder at the bend in the road, and we promise to wave as we leave. We walk down the field, stepping from tussock to tussock, towards the guardians’ hillock. ‘It looks like a barrow,’ Alec remarks. ‘Some kind of artificial mound.’ A burial mound, I think. Unexcavated. There are several on the Orkney Islands where you open a trapdoor provided by Scottish Heritage and climb down a ladder to see where the bodies of people subject to ancient and alien ritual lay for centuries. There were often animals there as well, horses and eagles beheaded to accompany a powerful man into the next world. On a bright day, with a square of blue sky in the doorway, it feels like a daring rather than foolhardy thing to do.

‘The road’s been cut into the end,’ I point out, and we go down to look. Maybe the road-builders disturbed bone and silver.

‘It is right at the edge of the flood plain,’ says Kathy the archaeologist. ‘The land’s getting bumpier anyway.’

‘You mean it’s natural?’ I ask.

‘Could be. Look, there are more hillocks at this level.’

Brynja stops at the sign showing the guardians with their blue and purple glow obscuring the road. Another lorry passes, and a jeep going the other way. Especially on a wet day, you can hear each vehicle approaching, coming up the hill from the university, and fading away to the north. It’s a restless place, I think, the side of the road. The Road, the one road. I can see why the hermit would come out and watch passing traffic, and why you might want watchtowers at your gate. Brynja conducts us back up the hill, over the rough yellow grass towards the dark cliffs, which reach into the low cloud. Rain splatters my hood and glasses. She tells us that they run team-building exercises here out of season. Her husband tells the corporate groups the stories she’s just told us, and then leads them through competitions and outdoor activities. She looks back over her shoulder, rain on her pink cheeks. ‘And he tells them they’re old games from Viking times, but really he makes them up!’

‘Because the Viking raiders did lots of team-building,’ I mutter to Alec.

But I can imagine that this would work. The bankers are called Viking Raiders in Icelandic. There is a tincture of pride in Icelandic shame (‘we do better self-loathing than anywhere else in the world’), and I’m sure that business leaders enjoy finding a Viking rationale for their endeavours.

‘Here,’ says Brynja, standing still. ‘Here, you can feel the energy here. Stand with your feet apart and breathe deeply, feel the energy coming up from the land.’

Alec stands square, drops his shoulders, closes his eyes and inhales the cold, damp afternoon. Kathy and I smile. British, self-conscious, the girls who spent five weeks travelling without talking to anyone at all.

‘The cliffs are full of energy and light too,’ says Brynja. ‘And do you see this bright line here?’ The grass in the field is last year’s, poking into my trousers needle-sharp, the colour of old hay, but there’s a diagonal line of green running up from the road. A ley-line, perhaps, or the elves’ path to the stream. Brynja grins. ‘It’s where the hot water pipe comes up from the mains.’

I don’t know how to respond. Brynja’s teasing our credulity, but she does also, I think, believe that there’s something out here. I don’t want to laugh at the hidden people, on much the same principle as I wouldn’t curse St Francis or summon the spirits of the decapitated eagles in Orkney’s Neolithic tombs, because it seems unsafe as well as offensive, but I’m not sure if Brynja is amused or impressed by her disappearing balsamic syrup, or maybe both. Brynja takes us past the playground, where there’s a sunken trampoline and a set of swings for the dwarves and the children to share, and pauses to greet the pigs, which she can’t think of eating, and the hens. Icelandic Settlement Hens, descendants of those brought by the original Viking Raiders a thousand years ago. Settlement Hens look ordinary to the uninitiated, but they’re valued both as emblems of Icelandic difference and because they cope well with the climate. There are some rocks where a new family of elves have just taken up residence, and then we come to the rock where you can hear the tall elves’ song. Sit on it, Brynja instructs us, and join in with the vibrations from the mountain, sing back to them. A raven flaps out of the cloud, rain patters. Alec takes a seat but I can’t sit on a hillside and sing to elves in a cliff. I can’t, in the same way that I can’t pretend to be a bear at toddler music group, even if it means sitting stiffly while all the other mums growl on all fours. One note or