The Ice Museum (12 page)

The Venerable Ancients—Burton dragged them to the quayside, forcing bunting into their hands, enlisting them in a ghostly procession of long-dead experts, waving banners: ‘You are now in Thule.' Saxo Grammaticus, Cluverius, Harduin and Dalechamp, Bougainville, Hill, Penzel, Pontanus, Thilo, Mercator and Mannert, listed Burton, an incantation of names, as he stood in the harbour surveying the cracked lava plains of Iceland. All of them thought that Iceland was Thule. Burton could see no reason to doubt the reality of Thule. Iceland might have been discovered by Pytheas, or even by the Carthaginians before him. ‘The old tradition of Thule, though different ages applied the word differently, was never completely lost,' Burton thought. Though the official rediscovery of Iceland dated from the Norse arrivals in the ninth century, there was evidence to suggest Irishmen had been going there in the century before, if not much earlier.

At least as early as the eighth century, wide-eyed clerics had been stepping onto this cracked land, casting themselves to the ground, seeing devils in the dark piles of lava. Seafaring Irish monks arrived on clerical outings, looking for an empty place to pray. They found pure white plains, dark hell pits; they scrambled around on the beaches, struck by visions of men dressed entirely in white, imagining Judas Iscariot chained to a rock, suffering eternal torment. Latin-muttering, margin-illuminating monks, trying to escape their blue-black cows, the wet pastures of Kerry. They found islands where tables were laid for dinner, covered with fish and grapes; they found themselves intoxicated by the smell of fruit on these opulent islands, but they would turn a corner, and find a devil urinating on their boat. They reported back from Iceland, which they called Thule, describing it as a place where the sun shone through the night in the summer, so bright that you could see the lice in your shirts, they reported. It was a confusing land the clerics found, full of mysteries, and they used it like a hermitage, sitting on the rocks, hearing the voice of God in the rumbling of the glaciers.

Burton drew in a later source, as further proof of his theory. There was Christopher Columbus, who might have sailed to Iceland, which he called Thule. From the dusty evidence, it seemed that Columbus might have sailed in February 1477, before his expedition to the New World. He knew Seneca, he knew the lines about the coming time when ‘the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries, and Thule will no longer be the extreme point among the islands.' Columbus found that Thule was as large as England, and the sea was not frozen, though the tides were rough, and the waves rose twenty-five fathoms twice a day. It was a place where the English went to trade. Columbus's claim to have reached Thule had been almost as controversial as Pytheas's original story. He was doubted because he had claimed the waves around Iceland were astonishingly high, because he placed the island too far north, and said that he sailed far beyond its coasts without being stopped by ice. Columbus was accused of being a braggart, who couldn't hear of a place without claiming to have reached it. Others suggested he had arrived in Iceland, but had exaggerated the details to make his journey more compelling.

Burton was part of another, later, list of names, brought in as an expert witness for an Icelandic Thule. Writing in the 1940s, the Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson used Burton as part of his argument that Thule had been Iceland. Stefansson believed that the ancient Britons had heard of Iceland, or even reached it in their boats, and told Pytheas about it when he arrived in Britain. And Stefansson was convinced that Columbus had been to Iceland. Sailing through sluggish seas, Columbus might have been surprised by a sudden storm, and in the chaos of the swell, waves smashing onto the deck, might have overestimated the height of the waves. Stefansson had a handful of points to back his argument that Iceland was Thule, but his main proof was Richard Burton. Richard Burton, wrote Stefansson, had believed that Iceland was Thule, and Burton was ‘known to some as a great figure in the history of nineteenth-century travel . . . admired as belonging with Caesar among those who can both do things and write about them.' The summing up for Iceland appeared conclusive, wrote Stefansson.

By the time he turned his attention to Thule, Stefansson had a long and controversial history of Arctic exploration behind him. He had proposed excitable theories about what might lie around the North Pole, imagining it as a region rich in minerals. In 1913 he had led a catastrophic expedition on the
Karluk
and had left his captain and crew when the ship became frozen in the ice. Many of those remaining on board died after the ship was sunk by the pressure of the ice. The survivors were forced to struggle towards Siberia. Stefansson returned safely, having spent years among the Inuit populations of the north. He needed the force of Burton's personality behind his theories, the icy glare of a convinced Victorian, surveying the sources.

 
 
At midday, Johannes the poet was sitting with a beer, biding his time. We were in a bar around the corner from the Town Hall, where young Icelandic couples were spread across sofas, drinking coffee and reading the papers. Johannes was small and dark-haired, wearing a tattered blue suit, a grimy white shirt falling out of his trousers, a style of deliberately debased formality. Johannes wrote skittish verse about life in the north. His hands were stained with ink, as if he had recently tipped an inkpot across them.

‘I write in the tradition of the Sagas,' he said, immediately, as I sat down. ‘We all in Iceland write in the tradition of the Sagas. It wasn't so long ago, everyone knew all the Sagas; they sat around in the evenings reciting them. On the farms in the valleys, there wasn't much to do. They called it the Icelandic Library, the old men and woman reciting the Sagas to each other, to their children and grandchildren, and of course eventually they knew them off by heart. I write in this tradition; as an Icelander it is inherent to me,' he said.

‘You asked me about Thule; I have even written a poem about it. I wrote one about Thule, because it is the most ancient reference to our nation, it shows that people knew about our country even before Christ. My poem is about the idea of a perfect land, and how that might be, and how Iceland has never really been a perfect land, because of the violence of the rocks, and because of the difficult history of the people. It's been a hard time, for the people. They lived well, though the Vikings were rough and vicious, until they were taken over by Denmark, and then after that the country slid into a decline for centuries, until the nineteenth century, when our poet Hallgrímsson took up literary arms for Iceland, and tried to stir his countrypeople up. He just wanted them to care, he was an amazing man. Jonas Hallgrímsson. I'll find you a poem by him too.'

That was how Johannes talked, a thick stream of words, with no real sign of stopping. It was perhaps the coffee; it was perhaps the overflowing bar, with the Icelanders draped scenically around; it was perhaps the length of the days, the awareness that the daylight would continue through the night that made Johannes so verbally energetic. Johannes opened his notebook, coughed into his ink-stained hand, and said, ‘This is my poem about Thule:

 
 
‘That's just the first verse; there are another fifty-two. One verse is just the word freedom, repeated thirty-four times. I like the word “freedom,” ' he said. ‘If you come to the café in November I am doing a poetry week. My subject is Liberty through Poetry. Sometimes, when I feel like it, I will organize a poetry evening, with a free salmon supper for anyone who can recite one of my poems from heart. This is no mean feat; I never write anything less than thirty stanzas long. I believe in the oral tradition. The Viking poems were originally recited—like your tradition, your Anglo-Saxon poems, with the scop—the poet. The scop was such a great thing to be, a poet sitting by the fire, with a beer, and then suddenly they'd call on him to make up a verse about anything—usually the same old things, of course—a battle or a dead warrior—and the scop would launch into something—I think that's a wonderful thing to do. At my recitals we try impro-poetry—where the audience decides the theme, and I jam with it, and I set a limit of forty-two stanzas to my improvisation. I like to improvise in iambic pentametres, but it's hard, you can imagine.' He laughed.

‘You should try our beer, Thule beer, it's very good, brewed in the north, in our second city Akureyri,' said Johannes, handing me a bottle. ‘I never write without having drunk half a crate of the stuff.'

There was something gently preposterous about Johannes. There was something gently preposterous about our encounter, as he sucked at his ink-stained fingers and spilt his beer on the table. His hands were shaking; I wasn't sure if it was nerves or an excess of frenetic energy. He was staring earnestly at his bottle of beer. ‘Could you recite me a poem?' I asked.

He sucked pensively for a while on his beer bottle before saying: ‘No, it's the summer. There's no time in the summer. It's in the winter I get really verbose. In the summer, haiku, maybe a sonnet. Only in the winter can we do epics. There's not much to do in the winter in Iceland. Perhaps people are glad of a chance to sit still for a while. We have a writer,' he added, ‘called Halldór Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, we are very proud of him. He was no poet, of course, our only poets are Hallgrímsson and me on my best days, but Laxness wrote all about the countryside, and he said that it's all very well thinking the countryside is full of the past, full of the memories of former Icelanders, and seeing the landscape as a great symbol of Iceland, but there are days when all we notice is the sun, the sun shining on the hills. On these days, the sun is stronger than the past. You can't always be banging on the drum, you know, some days you just sit and enjoy the warmth on your toes.'

Laxness loved the damp bogs where the farmers tended their sheep, the winds sweeping along the treeless hills, the sound of rain on stone. No Icelandic writer better evoked the vastness of the valleys, the broad winter skies, stained a deep blue, the simple lives of the people. His characters were disturbed, at times, by the strangeness of the land around them; in
Independent People
a farmstead seems to be haunted by an ill-favoured spirit, and the farmer finds his life slowly destroyed. They sometimes longed for escape, though when they stood on a quayside watching the ships being loaded, holding tickets to the USA, they found they couldn't leave; they turned their horses around, and galloped back to their cold valleys.

Later, Johannes rubbed my hand with his ink-stained palm, told me to read his poems, and then disappeared onto the street.

 
 
I left Reykjavík, under a cloud of rain. I drove out towards Thingvellir, the centre of the weird Icelandic Thule, once home to the Viking Parliament, the Thing. The road wound past scree mountains oppressed by mist, the valley floors scattered with shrubs and slender birch trees, the soil a vivid shade of orange. In a sudden sunny interval, the geothermal town of Hveragerði steamed under the scree. Small bakeries were selling dry cakes and salmon rolls, but the restaurants were shut, their blinds pulled down. The skies darkened and clouds hovered above the small town. The road ran across a plateau, as rain began falling in thick streams onto the dank grass. Across the farmland and the mud ridges I saw clouds of smoke rising slowly from Geysir ahead, mingling with the rain and the mist.

Geysir was a village engulfed in a geothermal haze. Through the mist the barrack-shapes of two hotels and the white concrete walls of a petrol station were dimly visible. At the field of the geysirs a few tourists stood in the rain, waiting for one of the boiling pools to erupt and blast a column of water out of the sand. Smoke was rising from the ground, drifting with the wind. The ground was multi-tone: red sulphur sand streaked with blue, brown and yellow, soft grey-white silica; coral-like rocks; rusty moulds, coated with water from the explosions and lashed by the driving rain. I stood over the steaming pools, watching the water bubble. The rain drowned out the soft gurgles and splutters from the steam pools. There was a rock kettle, with steam bursting out of a funnel, and a brilliant blue basin, with a puddle of water bubbling inside it.

At the Geysir Hotel they were serving up salmon in the restaurant, and when the rain started to fall harder everyone retreated there to watch the drifting clouds from a distance. The napkins were folded into towers on the tables. ‘Like the geysir spout,' said the waitress, smiling, as I sat down. The food arrived, and no one much noticed it. Everyone was fixed on the view through the window, sitting at an angle to the tables.

We all waited patiently, and as we speared salmon onto our forks the smaller geysir rumbled up to an explosion, spraying the plain.

In the early nineteenth century they had lined up in tents on the geysir field, bedding down not far from the Great Geysir: ‘We pitched our tent at a distance of about one hundred yards from the Geysir, and having arranged matters so that a regular watch might be kept during the night, I went to my station at 11 o'clock, and my companions lay down to sleep,' wrote Sir George Steuart Mackenzie. William Jackson Hooker, Fellow of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh, had arrived in 1809, and was disturbed during the night by an explosion, followed by ‘a most brilliant assemblage of all the colours of the rainbow, caused by the decomposition of the solar rays passing through the shower of drops that was falling between us and the crater.' Persistent, these travellers would stay for several days, camped by the geysirs, awaiting the subterranean rumbling, counting the minutes of the explosions, and noting them down in their immaculate pocketbooks. The geysirs, they wrote, danger of approaching them, rules to be observed, suspense while waiting, transparency and clearness of the waters, beautiful diversity of colours, eruption of the geysirs. They wrote poems, paeans to the red nostrils of the Great Geysir, imagining it like a dragon, its waters like fiery breath, a boiling deluge poured across the blasted heath.