For a moment Stefán is suspended in a stupor as he gapes at the black heavens. Then the wind blows the cloud mass towards him so quickly it is only a few moments before the first layer of grit rains down upon his head.
Complete darkness envelopes him so that he cannot make out his own hands in front of his face. A looming, smoky blanket of haze obscures the sun and the sky. The cloud showers down sand and ash an inch in thickness. It continues to rush south against the wind until the whole district is blanketed in darkness.
The cloud splits for a hair’s breadth of a moment only to reveal the appearance of fresh cones of smoke rising from the lowland hills. Stefán covers his nose and mouth with his neckerchief and helplessly watches the cloud increasing in size.
Another passel of earthquakes shakes the terrain. Stefán is overcome by a sense that there is something different about this cloud, this rain of ash, these tremors.
Weary with fear for his family, and with a sick feeling beginning to crawl up his throat, he’s unable to keep to his feet. Before the angry earth can throw him again, he falls to the ground.
The beast awakes. A mighty and absolutely ruthless, meaningless force heaves and struggles and bursts.
God seems to have deserted them.
The sun neither rises, nor sets.
These last two nights when Stefán beds down in the traveller huts it is with an anxious foreboding, and when the dark ekes out an even blacker existence, his fears oppress him, ghost-like.
A tremendous roar awakens him on the morning of the 12th of June. Laki finally finds its voice. Yet it screams not from its centre – it is not the volcanic mountain that speaks – instead, it screams from its side, a twenty-five-mile-long fissure underneath the glacier, from which a huge current of lava bursts and begins its awful, terrifying flow. Stefán quakes with it.
Flames burst into the air from the schism. Burning fountains of molten rock shoot up, up and up – thousands of feet high, and releasing hell on earth. The sky is painted with fire. Streaming, crashing lava rushes down the hills and threatens the low country leaving Stefán to imagine the desolation it has surely poured down upon the pastures and homes north of them, spreading its red-hot flood.
He hears shouts – the first people he has encountered on this leg of his journey. He is stupefied to see a smattering of men and women rushing towards him. What in the world are they doing here? Have these people abandoned their livestock, their livelihood? The motley group arrive gibbering; they have been running since morning. Shouting in the gaps of crashes of thunder, they circulate breathless stories of the lava flowing in such a wide mass that it looks like a giant bolt of cloth being unrolled upon anything in its wake.
Stefán asks each of them about his farm. Do they know if its people are safe?
No, they do not know. They come from the north.
The farmers report that the great river Skaftá north of them, that only days ago had been swollen with late spring’s clear water, is now fetid and filled with gravel and dust.
‘By the end of the day …’ A farmer spits ash, ‘… the Skaftá disappeared. It is gone.’
When the thunder finally ceases, an eerie whistling sound fills the silence. One of the men nods.
‘It is the Medalland’s old lava fields. They burn again. The air trapped in their cavities makes that sound. It is bleeding ghosts.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
It is the 13th of June. The waves pound furiously on the black volcanic sand. Stefán has been here before – when the sun cast a golden sheen on the basalt, infusing it with warmth. Today, in the sun’s absence, this shore littered with lava rocks is as dull and lifeless as a phantom’s kingdom.
His stomach knots with anxiety as he draws closer to the shore where the natural chiaroscuro of the scene appears before him like an etching. There on the black sand and clinging to a smoky fog, a schooner has run aground, split down the middle.
Empty barrels, their rims encrusted with the precious and expensive salt they once held, float in and out of the tide. As he draws closer a horrific tableau paints a beach littered with bodies. The shore’s tiny, black pebbles are embedded in the men’s bare chests. No. He sees they are not pebbles at all, but coffee beans studded into their lifeless skin. Shards from wooden planks protrude from limbs and stomachs. Everything is covered in black ash.
Stefán stumbles, searching through the haze. The wreckage continues on down the beach. A young man’s purple face looks up to the hidden sun; his head rests on the rock that split his skull. Stefán is almost delirious with joy – it isn’t Pétur’s face.
He wipes the ash from his face without thinking. Moving faster now, he combs the shore. Then he stumbles and falls next to the body of a young man whose mouth is open and filled with sand. Stefán focuses on the hair, then the face. A sand crab crawls out of his son’s mouth.
Stefán retches into the sea.
The great magistrate lifts his son in his arms and with his knees shaking and his body sinking into the sand, he carries him away from the shipwreck, away from the crashing, horrible sea.
Stefán sits in this corner by the sea and nurses a low moan that gradually builds into a rage. It is said that once, during the crashing of rocks and sharp snaps of thunder, while the lava flowed in its hot fury, there were those in the low country who heard a wail that transcended nature. It echoed through the hills from the beach that became a graveyard. Stefán is unaware that it is he who owns this moment of grief, for he is lost to the pain of it.
Somehow,
