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  Once at Kleifarvatn we found the roadsides filled with vans and catering buses. A nice Norwegian man explained that there was filming in the area. ‘What is it?’ demanded our driver. ‘Have I heard of this film or programme?’

  I disembarked and made a great show of casualness and wandered off ‘to eat my sandwiches’. I had no sandwiches and lost myself in rocks out of sight of the car as quickly as possible.

  ‘That was odd,’ I said to myself, to the rocks, to the world at large.

  The lake itself was beautiful – the waters a deep blue falling into jet depths unknown. The shore was muscovado. After the black range of the lava field, the territory here was brown. Above the red beach, rocks flaked almond. Serrated mountains reared either side. Two springs exhaled steam in the distance, one beside what looked like a tin chapel. I stared at it across the silent lake, feeling quite alone, the only sound the wind and ink-water shushing on the sand. I could have been the only person for miles around . . . but no. Behind me, I heard a car start up, then it appeared around a cliff – sun bug of doom creeping slowly round the lake. I ducked in case I was being sought.

  ‘Go to Kleifarvatn,’ Haraldur had said, ‘it’s a really strange place . . .’

  He was quite correct.

  —

  Several days later, I met Haraldur again. As we walked around the Marshall House gallery in Reykjavik harbour, a handsome white former fishmeal factory built in 1948, I told him how I’d survived a Kleifarvatn manhunt and escaped from my trouble spot à la Jack Reacher – hitching out, picked up by some jovial Turks – and he smiled as if such things were de rigueur in the Reykjanes.

  ‘But the lake,’ he pressed me, still twinkling but suddenly serious, ‘the lake is beautiful.’

  The lake was awesome, I assured him. Fathoms black, a dark portal.

  ‘To the deep Earth’s core,’ he nodded. ‘You know it disappeared? After earthquakes in 2000 a rift was created in the floor and a great deal drained away.’

  He then showed me pictures of a recent exhibition he’d staged a few months before, a pool of black maps on the gallery floor. He’d had them printed and folded by a famous map maker, black, then laid them out as a sea of ebon butterflies, twitching on the deck, alive to any movement of the air. Maps of void. Maps of night. Less maps of terra incognita as maps of terror. Maps of where Kleifarvatn went. Stygian maps in every sense.

  ‘Björk sat with them for an hour, staring through them,’ Haraldur smiled.

  ‘She’d recently released a song named “Black Lake” too . . . but that was only chance.’v

  WHITE WORLD III

  On the drive back to Reykjavik I sat in the front seat, the two lady wardens behind. There was some whispered worry as we swayed though the river and after a particularly vociferous sotto voce conference Stefán announced that there was only one driver and asked everyone else to please be quiet.

  I felt quite guilty about this since my heart had been in my mouth a good deal too on the way to Landmannalaugar – my thoughts full of hmmms, haas, and shitfuckshitfucks – but since it had just been Stefán and me in the cab, I’d kept such angst internal. And after an hour my fears had dissipated since it had become clear that I was driving with an expert off-roader. But I imagined it must be difficult for people who’d been so isolated and self-contained to relax and relinquish responsibility. Of course they were going to be torn to leave their home of several months and the 4×4 was shaking and bouncing around, water slapping at our windows. A couple of times on the journey out, when Stefán seemed to be calmly pitching us into voids white, dark or wet, I’d had to have a word with myself, ‘Stop breathing so weirdly, Dan. It’s embarrassing.’

  Through the river, listing over the marshmallow archipelago, back to the place where the twin tracks fanned, past the Silbury Christmas pudding, across the snow plateau until we were on a black ash track bounded by pylon walkers, then it was a return to clouds and reliance on the sat-nav dot. Eventually we arrived back at the clinker ridge above Ófært and the rebirth of the tarmac. Stefán got out to reinflate the tyres. I walked away a little up the hill with one of the wardens. The black denim view. Unexpectedly we began to talk. I explained that I was there to help with the sæluhús. I wasn’t from round here, I joked. She wasn’t from round here either, she said. She was from Germany. She’d come here when she was young and never gone home . . . became a nurse – she stopped, then plunged on – and although she felt Icelandic, she knew that it was not true. Now her brother was coming to visit her. Coming for the first time in years. They weren’t close any more and they’d once been so, so close . . . and she felt it was her fault. Tears ran into her scarf. ‘So close,’ she repeated, and I found my face wet also.

  ‘I’ve never told anybody,’ she said in a fierce whisper. ‘I’ve never told anybody.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stefán called somewhere behind us. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said quietly, gathering herself with a broad smile. ‘Now I cut.’ And she put sunglasses on and turned around.

  We never spoke again.

  HVÍTÁRNES

  I spent a week with Stefán and Atli, a young carpenter, working on sæluhús #7 Hvítárnes, which sits beside the ancient Kjolur Route – a Viking road which runs north– south through Iceland’s interior highlands, passing the famous Gullfoss waterfalls, Geysir hot springs and the country’s founding parliament stone; a pilgrim path for millennia.

  Ferðafélag Íslands built Hvítárnes in 1930 on the shore of a glacial lake named Hvítárvatn. The lodge is a two-storey structure, timber framed, clad in corrugated iron. It faces Langjökull, Iceland’s second largest glacier, which dominates the horizon of the north, looming opalescent and cavernously cold.

  As we drove down towards the lake, towards the glacier’s crazed face, sæluhús #7 emerged from the low sepia sweep of grass and marsh: red roof, green gables, white sides banked with turf. A little cabin sat up, hugging its knees.

  The first day was spent with Atli operating a mini digger we’d hauled out from town, shimming the turf in awkward swings and jabs and me carrying the cut sods away, cradling them heavy and cumbersome. Trying not to tear them. Then going back to the newly revealed earth to hammer away at the permafrost with a pickaxe, breaking it up so Atli could get the digger in and excavate the rocks and gravel beneath. Eventually, after a hard day’s back and forth-ing, Atli and I walk away from a trench where that morning there’d been a grass rampart.

  ‘You know this place we are going is a very haunted house?’ Stefán had announced on the drive out.

  ‘Oh yes?’ I’d asked.

  ‘Oh yes!’ he’d repeated whilst Atli nodded assent. But that was as far as we got in the 4×4. At dinner the first night he told me the story.

  ‘You notice that this house is built near some old farm ruins?’ Stefán began, pointing to a series of hummocks outside. ‘Well, there lived a farmer and his wife and they had a girl working too. The farmer tried to sleep with the girl but she said no and so, in revenge, he locked her outside in a snowstorm. So she died, and the farmer was killed by his wife to avenge the poor girl.’

  Stefán ended this story with a meaningful look.

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  Then we all walked round to the room next door where there was a bunk built at ninety degrees from all the others. ‘That’s the bad bed,’ he told me. ‘It’s built across a doorway. Sleep there and the girl runs through you.’

  Atli nodded and so did I.

  Strange as it might sound, none of this seemed abnormal. Hvítárnes existed in a land apart, completely other, with its own unique light and gravity.

  I remember sitting upstairs shortly after the ghost conversation – upstairs in the loft, gable window open, listening to Doppler geese flying over the flats.

  I grew to love and set aside this golden hour around midnight when the sun, skimming low over the glacier snout, coppered the sæluhús front and lit the grass and sedgeland red; Days of Heaven light spun gol
d. Some nights I’d stand in the front door and watch sun surf across the swells of grass, a leopard-print sea rolling out to the white mountains and glass of the horizon. The river banks before the house were soft as soot. The glacier face implacable enamel; beaming a hypnotic Cheshire cat charisma; pearly cruel. The panorama spread vast and cold; wind skimmed, assailed – Gretel Ehrlich’s big room of space sweeping past and whistling as it went; buffeting the cabin and the river in front, whipping the water into sharp little waves, backing it up, slowing the flow. To watch it happen was to see time turn around.

  In terms of work, we rebuilt one side of the sæluhús. The frozen turf ramparts having been dug away, we levered off the cabin’s tin cladding to reveal the timbers underneath, then set about replacing rotten planking and posts, burning scrap and offcuts in the kitchen stove.vi One afternoon we had the little burner running full blast in a room with no walls and I thought of Phileas Fogg on the steamboat Henrietta, burning all the wooden parts of his ship to keep up steam having run out of coal mid-Atlantic. And us, puffing away on the shining marshes – our little crew renewing the good ship Hvítárnes for voyagers to come.

  —

  Next morning I descended the stair-ladder from the loft to find Atli cooking breakfast and Stefán sitting red-eyed on his bunk. He looked a washed-out wreck. ‘The ghost,’ he said, flatly, massaging his nose. ‘I had a long night with the ghost.’

  He described his haunting as a series of dreams; dreams within a dream, none of them good. He’d been woken by a weight on his chest, something pinning him, pressing so that he could not breathe. He tried not to panic. He asked it to please get off him; he was polite. Unnatural silence. Not quiet: a total lack of sound – apart from his breathing, shallow and creaking.

  He was not sleeping in the bad bunk, but a lower bunk in the front room where we ate. Still held fast, the slats of the bed above a few inches from his nose, he began to talk, as best he could, about the work we were doing on the cabin; the fact he was repairing the building, respecting the fabric of the place and landscape; explaining that he meant no harm. Then it was gone, the ghost, the presence, the weight, and he closed his wet eyes and filled his pained lungs and turned to sit sideways out of the bunk, head in hands, aware that oily twilight was pooling in the room. After an indeterminate time, minutes or hours, he climbed the stair-ladder to Atli’s room and got into bed with him. Atli woke and turned, wide-eyed, and Stefán opened his mouth to explain and woke downstairs with an apparition pressing on his chest. He couldn’t breathe . . .

  This happened a number of times.

  ‘I’m part troll so I can deal with it,’ he told me with a wry smile but he looked utterly knackered, like a man who’d fought his way out of a supernatural tumble-drier.

  All the time we’d been talking the gas burners had been flaming and the windows were now misted opaque. Large tears had began to run down the glass, pooling on the bunkhouse floor.

  Hvítárnes’s guestbooks are filled with sightings, phenomena, feelings, uncanny goings on. Recurrent elements of hauntings include parties approaching a lit cabin with a figure visible inside but entering to find the house empty, dark and cold. Meetings with the silent figure of a woman in either the cabin’s entrance hall or around the single bed built across a former doorway nearest the stairs.vii

  Encounters with a ‘ghostly force’ whilst in bed and drifting between wakefulness and dream – the fraying borders of sleep, the mouth of that deep unfathomable forest. Unaccountable sounds and lights emanating from upstairs when guests are downstairs and vice versa and, very occasionally, there is mention of ‘a horrible black face in the east window of the house’, assumed to be that of the farmer.

  The first log of the ghost occurred in July 1938. ‘Got the Ghost’ wrote an anonymous hand who only identified as ‘coming from Hveravöllur and going to Reykjavik’. The following year (August 1939) Francis Gordon Reid, an English dentist, wrote ‘ghosts’. I love the formidable pith of these notes and smile again to read them now. Here be laconic monsters.

  Later travellers were more explicit about ghostly goings on. Here is the note from a group of friends from Europe who visited Hvítárnes in August 1979:

  This was a terrible night.

  At 11:30 we have been awakened by a most peculiar noise upstairs. Dieter wanted to go upstairs to investigate the noise but was thrown backwards down the stairs by some inexplainable blow. After this Jeanine tried the same, now imagine: she was lifted up by some invisible hand. This happened in front of all of us. When Jeanine came back to consciousness, she found herself right on the top of the roof. We all climbed on the roof in order to rescue Jeanine. At this exact moment, we heard a feminine voice downstairs in the cabin whimpering something that sounded like ‘HELWITIS KATLIN’ which does not make any sense to us. Coming back we were terrified by a supernatural light flickering over the bed which is located under the staircase. At this moment we just lost our nerves and ran outside . . . where we spent the rest of the night shivering and trembling in bracken.

  It was only in the morning that we dared to come back to this haunted house, just to fetch our belongings and to testify to this very strange experience.

  21 September 1996 – two anonymous companions planned to stay the night:

  Arrived at 6:30 pm. Had dinner and went to bed.

  Woke up at 3:30 [downstairs at the front of the house] – heavy footsteps in the attic, doors slamming and furniture moving back and forth.

  Fled just after 4:30 [and spent the] night out in a car.

  Strange light was seen in a window of the house sometimes.

  When we left, we turned back to see the house and saw light surrounding everything inside.

  PS: Never come back here.

  Reading these accounts back in Reykjavik,viii my mind retraced the road out to Hvítárnes – the miles out past Geysir and Gullfoss to where the tourist coaches could go no further and the road had become compressed snow; on to the place where we’d encountered a bulldozer, massive yellow tanktracked wedge: the leading edge of the road; and on another hour or two over vestal drifts, forging our own path until we reached a bridge across Hvítárvatn’s steely meltwaters. There snow ended and the mousey marshes began, the 4×4 sloshing through waist-high swims surrounded by bare dwarf bushes beaten down wyrd by the wind. Finally, framed by the glacier, rising charged and singularly lonely from the levels, our preoccupied haunt.

  ‘Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall,’ wrote Rebecca Solnit, ‘but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence . . . words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.’7

  In Hvítárnes the silence hums whilst turning the rocks over for you. Some places invite you to engage and be changed and some give you no choice at all.

  —

  On our final day Atli told me about a week he’d spent alone on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica – completely alone in the featureless white with only far distant mountains for company; how it had been fine, really good, actually; he’d been part of an expedition; how in fact he’d been to Antarctica twice . . . He broke this news so lightly, so kindly, perhaps concerned about hurting my feelings and bursting the bubble as a would-be trailblazer. ‘Wow,’ I said, stunned. ‘Amazing stuff, Atli. You kept that quiet!’ And he grinned. And I thought of his skills and capability – this gentle twenty-something man out here on the digger, hefting a pick, showing me the best way to tackle the hard earth; the way he’d set about de-nailing the tongue and groove inside the cabin – all smooth practised movements and efficiency, clear eyes and calm manner; the warmth in his demeanour; the happy bonhomie he and Stefán shared. Expedient people. Eminently tough, good-humoured and able.

  Atli told me how he and Stefán once moved a couple of rundown Ferðafélag Íslands buildings out to his farm with a view to repairing and reusing them somewhere down the line. They’d dug them new foundations and patched
them up a bit, meaning to see to them properly once winter was over and the days drew out again. But the winter storms that year were spectacularly bad and the buildings were torn from their foundations – in the case of one, picked up and dragged several hundred metres together with its foundations – before exploding in the monster gales; torn to shreds. ‘Yeah,’ said Atli cheerfully. ‘It was a bad one. The buildings were completely blown up and away. The largest bit I found which wasn’t made of concrete was a wood panel about a foot square. Bad weather. Really bad. Really not good.’

  Stefán had just got on with his job the morning after his haunting; put on his padded boiler-suit and carried on with the work; wasn’t put off by it, took it in his stride. That’s just how Icelandic people are, I think. It’s just the sort of thing they say: ‘Luckily I’m part troll’; ‘It was a bad one. The buildings were completely blown up and away. The largest bit I found which wasn’t made of concrete was a wood panel about a foot square’; ‘You have writer’s hands, Dan. You need to toughen up.’

  —

  The morning I flew home from Iceland, as the plane’s silhouette fell away and sped green-grey over Keflavik – a spectral cross flickering ever smaller over scrub, black rocks and deepening blues – I imagined a shadow self left behind, an offering to the land, now stowed unseen beneath the sea.

  Iceland: black and white, gold and blue; fire and ice; a supernatural state where the line between dream and reality feels gossamer thin. To negotiate such a territory one needs a grounding, a guide – Icelandic nous.

  I was very lucky to have met Stefán and Atli because they allowed me insight into Iceland as Icelanders behold it. Their practical intelligence and environmental outlook is balanced, perhaps founded is a better word, on Iceland’s ancient myths and folktales – stories passed down and taught to each new generation, most dealing with man’s relationship with the powerful natural world. Respect for nature and the spirits of the land – the trolls and huldufólk, hidden people – is central to all such stories and rather than being an eccentric anachronism, such narratives have created a deep connection with the land and a national character steeped in sustainability.