A true story, said The Regular, in the past, the foreign tourists who came to Öræfi were European noblemen and geniuses, lords, earls, princes, scholars, and philosophers; now it’s a hollow, trashy rabble! In bygone days, foreign relations were much better than now: Öræfings knew foreign languages, Latin, Hebrew, Dutch, French, English, Danish, German. Today, no-one here knows any foreign language even though there’s a thousand times more foreigners than locals—except for Flosi from Tvísker, who reached great perfection in English by listening to English language education programs on the Icelandic Broadcasting Service for several decades. I don’t know where they’d be without him. Back when, Öræfings could manage on their own, lived sustainable lives, they had enough to clothe themselves, feed themselves, make tools, they could sustain their existence, so says the naturalist Þorvaldur Thoroddsen about his arrival in Öræfi in the 19th century, and it’s still the case, it’s likely the only self-sufficient place in the whole country, exactly as it was when Sveinn Pálsson came to Öræfi, when Eggert Ólafsson and Bjarni Pálsson came to Öræfi, and Jón Steingrímsson the Fire Cleric tells the same story, he wrote the praise poem “Öræfingahrós,” a panegyric from the Fire Cleric to the Öræfings, he found the people ideal, the epitome of the language, the epitome of the body, the epitome of the spirit, the epitome of morals, the epitome of culture. And in this place, travellers found their peace.
I decided to rest the horses and let them eat a little grass in Sandfell; they found the trunk rather cumbersome, but wouldn’t let anything bother them, they were truly strong, unstinting horses, as I had read about Captain Koch’s. For my part, I decided to lay under the rowan, but the ravens cawed irregularly, so I crawled down into the trunk and fell asleep for a bit. I tried to decide whether to read the sign or not. Then I wrote down in my diary everything that had happened since the morning.
I woke up that night and didn’t know where I was. I heard all sorts of scratching in the dirt and a strange chirping in the farmyard, I felt something that could fly land on the trunk, I heard first a whistling, then a little thud on the lid, the sound of a claw right across the lid, a scratch, more like a smack, and then again, a loud chirp, a tongue clicking. The ravens, probably. Early in the morning as I dozed I felt a knock on the trunk; I jumped up, but there was nobody there. Seeing a light in the kitchen, I hurried over, chilled to my bones, poorly-rested. The brothers were all in the kitchen, and they gave me moss milk, which they have for breakfast every day, they told me, ever since they were very little; they credit their good health to moss milk, although they’re all as old as dogs.
Did you sleep well in your trunk, fellow? Sigurður from Tvísker asked, it’s a really handsome trunk, are you going out onto the glacier all alone? That’s not very wise, but you should be safe if you travel carefully over the crevasse area, it’ll surely be covered by snow this time of year. Eggert’s Travelogue says that the glaucous gull, laurus hyperboreus, lays its eggs in Mávabyggðir, Hálfdán chimed in, I don’t know if that’s still the case … Or Eggert and Bjarni’s Travelogue says about their trip east to Öræfi, Sigurður corrected, men had newly-arrived with eggs when Eggert and Bjarni showed up, it’s a remarkable pathology to always imply Bjarni and only say Eggert, Eggert Ólafsson’s Travelogue when Bjarni’s part is no less, you ought to say Eggert and Bjarni’s Travelogue, Sigurður insisted, Eggert and Bjarni say this or that in the Travelogue, not just Eggert … Hálfdán leaves Bjarni out because he was the one who shot the birds, said Sigurður. But Eggert made a book of birds, said Hálfdán, amused, an account of birds, sketches of birds …Are you writing a Travelogue? … The Travelogue of Bernharður Fingurbjörg, not such a bad title, I thought, the Tvísker brothers are so famous, so much has been written and said about them that I suspect it doesn’t matter if I scribble something about them too, I thought, maybe something foolish, when it comes down to it nothing accurate ever gets written about anyone, a person’s character is always wrong and misrepresented, even if you write about yourself, your character is made to say something it has never said or thought, everyone is always making people tell things they never told, do things they never did; that’s how it’s always been done, writing about humans, dead and alive, humans get described mistakenly, made to use words they have never spoken, made alive when they’re dead …That’s folktales, said Sigurður, and culture, much was said and written about Einar from Skaftafell and his giantess, who some reckon wasn’t a giantess, just a criminal come south from Landbrot; a certain image of Einar emerges in these writings and it would be pretty miraculous if it were at all similar to the Einar who actually lived in Skaftafell. This means we’ve now got two Einars from Skaftafell: one dead, so nobody can know anything about him, the other living on in folktales and able to constantly change and multiply himself as more people write about him, but fortunately most of the stories are the same, since everyone mimics what others have written, Sigurður said; we can never know if Einar from Skaftafell as we know him through stories is at all similar to the Einar who really lived in Skaftafell, and it’s probably all much of a muchness.
There used to be great black-backed gull nests in Mávabyggðir, and even barnacle geese, said Hálfdán, as we all sipped our moss milk; birds and insects and plants are continually settling the land. He gave me an insect sucker and told me which tube I should suck and which I should aim at the insect, if I saw anything special on Mávabyggðir I should let him know, if I remembered to. It’s been a long time since I went there, he said, no one goes to Mávabyggðir any longer. If memory serves, my last trip there was in 1940, when we brothers went, out of curiosity, wanting to check out the settlement sites and birds’ nests and even the outlaw sheep, what used to be called feral sheep, outlaw sheep are sheep which have been out so long that they have become a special species, or sub-species, dissimilar from other sheep in Iceland, in the whole world really. By the way, I went down to the sand this morning to look for birds, and saw a gull. To find one’s way up Mávabyggðir, said Sigurður, follow the strip on the glacier which goes from Breiðárlón up to Mávabyggðir; there’s another strip coming down the mountain, so you shouldn’t get lost. Do you have enough provisions? Don’t you want to take this layer cake with you?
I picked up the ancient military survey map and went over the route with them. The glacier has retreated significantly, said Sigurður, a large lagoon has now formed in front. I often headed east with my father to Breiðármerkurjökull to cut ice stairs, a route for horses over the glacier, said Sigurður; he was in charge of the route, that needed doing every time someone went across because the glacier was so unstable, it pressed forward then retreated and many crevasses emerged thanks to the changing water level, and naturally there was no bridge over the Jökulsá, it was always impassable around midsummer, the only way was to detour via the glacier, which usually took three hours, nowadays it takes three seconds to cross the bridge, I sometimes went along when my father accompanied people over, and we checked out the glacier’s pace, he said he wanted me along for entertainment, we liked being together, and one time when I was ten years old, in 1927, my father was expecting the mail carrier and his brother and was planning to head east to bring them over the glacier; Jón, my father’s brother, was a teacher in Svínafell, where my father grew up, that day the rains were extremely severe and the glacier difficult to traverse, so my father decided to wait and hope they would not head out onto the glacier in such weather. We sat at home all day, my father very nervous, felt sure something had happened, I tried to be cheerful for him, tried to amuse him, but he alternately sat there dejected or else paced the carpet. The more the day wore on the more uneasy he grew, coming to regret not having left that morning; now it was too late. That night the mail carrier arrived with two women and said that there had been an accident on the glacier, we started off as soon as it got light, the weather now good, the mailman said what had happened, and my father asked repeatedly for details: the accident had happened when my uncle Jón was headed
west over the glacier with the mail carrier and two women, he and the mail carrier were cutting stairs in the ice for the horses while the two women were standing below holding the horses; then something seized Jón and he walked down the stairs to the women; they were cold standing there in the rain; Jón took the horses and the women walked up the stairs to where the cutting was being done, wanting to help out. That saved their lives because at that moment the glacier above the horses burst apart, splitting, crashing down in large pieces, submerging the horses and Jón, my father’s brother; three horses were rescued alive after much effort, the other three were crushed between floes in the collapse and died. The mail carrier and the women looked about in the darkness for Jón but could not see him, they went home to Tvísker, soaked and shivering, they searched the next day but didn’t find Jón, my father kept looking, although the others stopped and he frequently searched for him in later days. I would go along to see if we could do anything to retrieve what we’d lost. One day the next year my father and I were there checking the road and suddenly saw a horse’s head protruding from a high glacial wall, and my father knew the horse, it was the horse the mail cargo would have been on, we went and got a crew to chop the ice and as we were striking at the ice, giving it a sturdy blow, we saw one of Jón’s feet, shortly after that we reached the body. Under the horse’s body we found a coffer, mangled and crushed to pieces; inside were six small postbags full of money, wet and stinking, because pressure inside the glacier had burst the horse and its intestinal fluid must have leaked through the glacier over the mail, which was rescued and cleaned; the body was driven by cart to Kvísker and a coffin built around it, then moved to Svínafell, and buried in Sandfell. People guessed that Jón had lived for some time after he became trapped in the glacier because his body wasn’t badly injured; when we found him, we saw he had lain down to his last rest with his arms folded and his hat over his face.
At that moment, the phone rang in Tvísker and Sigurður got up, left the kitchen to pick up the handset, and said: It’s for you Hálfdán. Hálfdán went to the phone, I heard him say, Yes, naturally, naturally …Then he returned and said, It was Kiddi, he found a dead bird that he thinks is a Eurasian woodcock because it’s a little bigger than a common snipe, he’s going to bring it here around coffee-time today. Isn’t Kiddi your friend? asked Sigurður. Yes, I said, yes, we travelled east together. Do you use the internet? I asked. Sure, Sigurður answered, sometimes it hurries things along, although you find a lot that’s wrong, I’m the only one who uses it as a tool, though I’m the eldest. He writes reams on the computer, said Hálfdán, he has always diligently adopted modern technology. Sigurður contended that Öræfi had entered the present when the phone lines were laid across Skeiðarársand in 1929, not when the bridge was consecrated in 1974; 1929 broke the isolation, 1974 created something else, something I cannot comprehend, perhaps the only thing that happened was that mice came, before then it was considered the only province in the world without mice, said Sigurður, you couldn’t have cats, they all died of boredom, interjected Hálfdán, although a single mouse was found in a mansion in 1941, the first mouse known in Öræfi, no more mice were seen until nineteen sixty-something, then one was seen in Skaftafell; both mice were likely brought with the mail or in someone’s luggage and then slipped out, but after bridges crossed the sand, mice became widespread in no time and the cats had quite enough to be getting along with. Hannes, the rural post carrier at Núpsstað, once saw a mouse’s trail in the fresh snow at Núpsvötn, he followed the trail to the river, and saw where the mouse had reemerged on the other bank, and Hannes barely wondered about how small a distance the stream had taken the mouse downstream. But the phone meant security, said Sigurður, it became possible to call across the sand and send people to help or as escorts, we could inform one another about impassable routes and ever-changing rivers, about whether the Skeiðará was flooding; the phone saved lives. Now perhaps there’s too much talking into such devices, I don’t know. Then the phone rang again, as if in protest. Hálfdán went and answered it. When he returned to the kitchen, he said: That was the University, wondering why I keep sending them empty matchboxes. They aren’t empty, I send them little flakes I find on the glacier and want chemically analyzed, but they must overlook the flakes; maybe they evaporate on the way.
I bid farewell to the Tvísker brothers in the farmyard, all looking happy. They thanked me for the tart and I thanked them for the cakes, the hospitality and the dissemination of knowledge. You go east to Breiðamerkurfjall, Flosi called after me, and up to the glacier there via the rock strip. I looked back and couldn’t see anyone in the farmyard, come to think about it I never saw Flosi, you should indeed head a little way north, the voice in the farmyard said, a voice in my head, and then you’ll hit Mávabyggðir … Adios! …
It was a great wonder to come upon dry, bare land when my map told me it should be entirely concealed by glacier; I felt like I was under the map, in a Borges story. I had the military survey map from 1903, made according to Captain Koch’s measurements, and I could see how many kilometers the glacier had retreated in 100 years. There are no place names here, I pointed out to myself, just eroded stones in varied colors, tremendously large rocks the glacier has hauled along then left behind, this is new land, I noted, Sigurður from Tvísker told me there was once a great forest here, the hero Kári Sölmundarson lived here after the burning of Bergþórshvoli, an incident told in Burnt-Njáls Saga, the glacier destroyed this green earthen landmark and then unveiled it again anew, the way a theatre curtain reveals a new scene after the intermission.
I summited a steep slope and saw two glacial lagoons facing me at a distance, the nearer is called Fjallsárlón, the farther-off Breiðárlón, both of these lagoons had formed in the foregoing decades after the glacier began to retreat. There was fog in the middle of the mountainside. I was amazed at how the two valley glaciers descended from the clouds, rough and hideous as they crept across the land. I needed to head between the lagoons to get to Breiðármerkurfjall; a glacier river flows between the lagoons; whereas I crossed by cable car, before you had to go right out onto the glacier to reach the mountain. I ferried the horses over in the car because I didn’t want to get them wet walking the glacier; I took one horse on my first trip, quite a tight fit in the iron car’s cage.
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