Man, the thought of having a wall of basalt and a cinder cone in my backyard, I tell you, nothing could be better.
.
If you don’t drive too quickly and get off Highway 1, you’ll find it. It’s a poor, poor farm, but, as Gunnar said, poverty is wealth, because everything the land gives comes straight from faith, as a gift, and gifts are not to be laughed away.
Just west of Hengifoss, there is an ogress’s stairway, leading to the high country and off to Myvatnsveit.
She is not absent from it. Every ledge on the mountain has a name. Each is a separate sheep pasture. Talk about trusting ancient forces with one’s sheep (the “hidden people” just seems wrong, given how visible she is), or what.
Amazingly, he has no story and no name. I think this is because he’s a pretty friendly guy overall, although during my week beneath him, I couldn’t help but wonder just how much his scree slope had moved onto farmland over the last 1100 years, and how many hundred metres the sea had eaten away the fields to the right.
The Njardivk Road (No. 94), looking north from Geldingjafjall.
Look at the sun playing in the breakers at the river mouth in the distance!
That Finnish smiths chained a dragon to the bottom of the lake in olden times, is well known.
That it gets out and flies through the air above the water from time to time is something rarely talked about. But it did last July 1. Here it is.
Buðahraun
Around 10:30 pm.
It’s so beautiful to watch Icelanders working out how to work with wood, after these 1100 years with precious little of it except what washed up on the beach from Siberia.
It brings a whole new appreciation to the mystery of the substance.
First it appears in one farmer’s stable…
Skagafjörður
…, and then another’s.
It is great fun trying to outrun it.
This is Eldborg, “Fire Mountain.”
It used to lie on the main road to the East.
Now it’s out of the way and forgotten in a barren land.
But don’t drive past. It’s beautiful on Fire Mountain.
At Midsummer, the mountain erupts again.
And comes to life.
Or life comes to it.
Hard to say which.
Both at once, perhaps. Note how just for a couple weeks, every glob of stone develops a body and lives.
It is a fantastical riot of life. Everything is alive.
And then the mountain goes back to solemnly watching the Grindavik Road.
All kinds of people.
All kinds of watching.
A well deserved rest in the Vatnsdalshólar.
