ended?’
‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’said Kjartan. ‘Actually the only warning that people got was several small earthquakes the evening before the eruption started. No one paid much attention to them, since people thought the tremors came from the area where they’d recently finished constructing the Burfell power plant. Now I’m no specialist in quakes, but I was told that one of the three seismographs set up to record the movements of the earth’s crust was broken, making it impossible to determine their epicentre with any great precision. Not a single person put two and two together when they felt the tremors.’ Kjartan paused. ‘There were actually various other signs that no one paid any attention to,’ he added, avoiding her eyes.‘A woman who lived on the edge of town, at the place where the eruption began, was amazed to see that the elves were packing up and moving out two days before it started.’
‘Elves?’ repeated Thora carefully. ‘I see.’ She decided to keep her opinion to herself where elves were concerned.
‘Yes, and several days earlier, a little girl told her parents that an eruption was about to happen at the place where the fissure was formed.’ Kjartan shrugged. ‘There are other stories like this, about unexplained events just prior to the disaster, but one never knows how much store to set by them. An amateur painter, for example, did a painting of the area showing the volcano and lava before these events occurred. I actually believe that some people can somehow sense catastrophes before they happen – just as animals seem to. However, I’m not one of them.’
Thora silently thanked God for that small mercy. ‘Then the eruption started in the middle of the night?’
‘Yes,’ said Kjartan, seemingly relieved that Thora didn’t want to talk about the supernatural.‘The fissure opened at two o’clock in the morning and started spewing lava. It wasn’t more than two hundred metres from the nearest farm, so it’s a miracle that everyone was saved.’
‘People must have been terrified,’ said Thora. ‘I’ve never been near an eruption, but the noise must have been incredible.’
‘It might be hard to believe, but there wasn’t that much noise,’ he replied. ‘Most of those who lived nearest the site were woken by the noise, but many people who lived farther away had to be woken up. Police cars, fire engines and other vehicles drove around the streets of the town with their sirens on, to warn people. A little later the decision was made to evacuate the Islands, and people were asked to go down to the harbour. Most people didn’t need to be told twice, and for some reason most of them had flocked down there anyway. A few people, however, had to be persuaded to leave.’
‘Didn’t they realize the danger they were in?’ asked Thora. ‘I’d have thought a spouting volcano in your back garden might be pretty persuasive.’
‘Of course it was the middle of the night, and people were still a bit sleepy. Some people thought there was a fire; the first person to see the eruption called the police and reported one. He was the farmer in Kirkjubasr, and the fissure went through his farm. Just over two kilometres long, if you can imagine it.’ Kjartan appeared almost proud that this hadn’t simply been a little tourist eruption. ‘Now, others thought that some sort of war had broken out. The Cold War was in full force by then – as was the Cod War, of course. And keep in mind that the present-day landscape is deceiving and you can’t really tell what happened from how it looks now.
The Eldfell cone didn’t exist at that time – it was formed in the eruption. It was just flat land, and suddenly a row of lava spouts appeared out of the earth. From a distance they could very well have appeared to be burning buildings, or a big grass fire. And of course, everyone reacts differently in a crisis.‘Kjartan smiled to himself, remembering. ’I ended up talking a woman out of her house, which was very close to the fissure vent. She had got up and started making pancakes! We had a hell of a job persuading her to put down her pan.‘
Thora laughed. She noticed that Bella was sitting there as if fossilized; she’d not moved a muscle since sitting down. Thora didn’t know whether that was good or bad; either the girl was paying rapt attention, or she was miles away. ‘But in the end you got everyone off the Islands?’
‘Yes, we did. We managed to get everyone up and on the move in about an hour, and people made their own way down to the harbour. The weather had been unfit for sailing the day before, so the entire fishing fleet was in the port. Otherwise enormous carnage would have occurred, since it was only a short time from the start of the eruption until red-hot ash and debris started raining over the town. Tephra, it’s called. That made everything much more dangerous.’ Kjartan leaned back.‘Those of us on the rescue crews really had to run for it. It looked as if the lava would close the harbour, since the fissure reached all the way down to the seaward approach at Ystaklettur Cliff. We were in a really tight spot -we needed to get five thousand people out of there. Not to mention the sheep and chickens.’
‘Sheep and chickens?’ echoed Thora. ‘You sent farm animals to the mainland by boat? What about the dogs and cats?’
She hadn’t thought about that. Naturally there had been other living things on the island besides people.
‘Dog ownership was forbidden at the time, but most of the cats were left behind. There was no chance to round them all up. Most of them died as the eruption went on, from the toxic fumes. The sheep, on the other hand, were sent immediately to the mainland on helicopters from the American base, while the chickens were transported by ship,’ replied Kjartan. He stopped suddenly. ‘Even though I watched my own house disappear beneath the lava, the hardest part of the eruption was when the cows from Kirkjubaer were led down to the harbour to be slaughtered. It was horrific. The farm was the first building to disappear, since the volcano was on that farmer’s land, and he was quite old and in no position to start farming again. There was no other option, but it was pitiful. Natural disasters affect animals terribly, and to make matters worse I think the cows sensed that this trip down to the harbour would be their last.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The farmer went to the mainland the next morning by plane. Everything that he owned fitted into a little box that he held in his lap the whole way.’
Thora pushed the image out of her mind – Markus’s box was enough for her. ‘In other words, everyone abandoned the town?’ she asked.
‘Somewhere between two and three hundred men remained behind to try to salvage whatever they could. Everyone else – among them the women and children, of course – was sent to the mainland. It was God’s mercy that the fleet was in the harbour. It would not have gone so well if the boats had been out fishing, I can tell you that.’Kjartan looked out for a moment over the harbour before turning back to the two women. ‘People were piled up on board the boats and packed in everywhere they could fit. The seasickness was awful. It’s no fun to be tossed about on the waves, surrounded by the stink of fish, if you’re not used to it. Not to mention if you’re sleep-deprived and suffering from shock.’Bella obviously was listening, because out of the corner of her eye Thora saw her grimace. ‘Were there any other boats in the harbour apart from the ones from the Westmann Islands?’ she asked. ‘Foreign vessels, for example?’
‘No, none,’ replied Kjartan immediately, glowering at her. ‘Out of the question.’
Thora decided not to pursue this, although she had hoped that a foreign boat might have been moored there.‘Do you remember anything about Markus that night, or Alda, his girlfriend?’
‘No,’ replied Kjartan, without hesitation. He fell silent, clearly unwilling to elaborate.
‘Are you absolutely certain?’asked Thora, surprised at the swiftness of his response. ‘He wasn’t there with his father, your friend?’
‘I must have seen his father, although I don’t specifically remember it,’ scowled Kjartan. ‘He worked on a rescue crew and was in the Islands during the days following the eruption, although I don’t recall whether I met him that night. I don’t remember the boy at all, nor Alda for that matter. There was a crowd of people there. They all had their arms piled high with whatever they had decided was most valuable at the moment they were forced to head to the harbour, the most incredible collection of things. In most cases what truly mattered was left behind; photo albums and other keepsakes were forgotten in the mad rush to save new standard lamps or other worldly goods that would soon become worthless.’
‘But are you sure you fully realize which Alda I’m talking about?’ persisted Thora.
