The Ice Museum by Joanna Kavenna Page A

throughout the ages, birthing new mountains and islands, the rocks were constantly shattered and flooded with steaming waters. Iceland was a land where flames burst from the ice and burning lava spread across the land. A land in a state of flux: the volcanic flames flickering above ancient glaciers, red on white, the fires fading into the purple blackness of the lava fields. A land where ice mountains melted and flames cooled to rock. Bold, callous colours, crazy stretches of whiteness lurking in the gaps among the barren mountains, savage darts of flame in the dusk. The Victorians came for the mountain of Hekla, once thought to be the entrance to hell, or for Snaefellsjökull, Jules Verne’s entrance to the centre of the earth. They came for the view over the ragged lava piles, and the moon landscapes. They came for the thousand cones and spikes of volcanic ground, forged in successive eruptions. A place like Thule: an interim point between the familiar and the outlandish.
    When the Victorians arrived, there was a living convention of perorations to the ragged lava plains, the devil holes, the sulphur pots, the lairs of Beelzebub, each bubbling spring or jagged rift representing a different aspect of the Dark Prince. Most of the travellers’ hysteria focused around the Geysir, though a few amazed words were reserved for the volcano Krafla in the north of Iceland and the terrible former Viking capital of Thingvellir, where the earth cracked in two. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Dr. Uno von Troil, Mr. William Jackson Hooker, Sir George Steuart Mackenzie, and Ebenezer Henderson had vied for exploratory firsts. They were frequently astonished, like Dr. Von Troil, who travelled in 1772, finding a devastated land of barren mountains, eternal snow and vitrified cliffs. Sir George Steuart Mackenzie, Baronet, Fellow of the Royal Society, travelling in 1810, found that despite his various titles he could not convey the mingled raptures of wonder, admiration and terror with which his breast was filled, and that was just at the sight of the Geysir, the exploding hot spring. These early visitors divided their bemusement into sub-headings: ‘On the Pestiferous Effects of the Air,’ ‘Of Steeped or Macerated Fish,’ or ‘Of the Peculiar Instinct of the Horses in this District.’ They were transfixed by the fantastic groups of hills, craters and lava, the distant snow-crowned glaciers, the mists rising from a waterfall, the profound silence, glowering clouds, the crazed element of fire ravaging the land.
    The Victorians gathered coats and hampers, and arrived in the capital, Reykjavík, buying up horses, trotting out to the sites—the Great Geysir, Thingvellir, or the lava plains in the north. They stood in the rain, reciting the Sagas, as William Morris did; they came in genteel tour groups, like Anthony Trollope and his party, spilling slippers and smoking jackets onto the lava fields, in a procession of nearly a hundred horses. Through repetition in their diaries, the arrival became a ritual, a moment of recited stanzas and set phrases. The boat would dock, after a lurching voyage of some weeks, the passengers sick at heart, longing for the shore. They saw mountains standing out sullen and forbidding against a grey sky. They admired the scorched lava fields stretching away. In the summer the nights were dark blue, and the sky was always tinted with daylight colours. The interior stretched away, an inhospitable waste at the time, almost entirely unknown.
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The banner still hangs, LAND OF FIRE AND ICE, across the rain-doused country. Iceland touts its wares. The tourists come for the natural pyrotechnics, as the Victorians did. Everyone is dragged to Iceland on a tractor beam of hyperbole, lured by stories from the constantly mutating island. The tourist brochures breathe visions of the earth’s crust, spewed liberally across the land. A land like a disaster film,