It should have been completely dark, even this far north. But I was not surprised by the strange light. In Iceland, during June and July, the sun never sets.
The temperature, however, was much colder than I had expected.
“I’m freezing,” I said.
My stomach was complaining even louder.
“I don’t care about the cold anymore. I’m starving.”
Just then, we reached a small hut whose door seemed to welcome us.
It was only a peasant’s home, but the people inside treated strangers like honored guests. As soon as we got down from our horses, the owner came out, shook our hands, and motioned for us to follow him.
We followed him through a long, narrow, dark passage. The house was built from roughly cut wooden beams, and this passage led to every room.
There were only four rooms: a kitchen, a workshop where the family did their weaving, a bedroom shared by the whole family, and a better room reserved for guests.
My uncle’s great height was a problem.
“Watch your head,” I warned him.
Too late.
Bang!
He had hit his head on one of the low beams.
“I think this house was built for shorter men,” he muttered.
Our room was large but very simple. The floor was hard-packed earth, and a small window let in a little light. The windowpanes were made from a kind of parchment prepared from sheep intestines, so they were hardly transparent at all.
Our beds were long wooden boxes filled with dry hay. Red paint and Icelandic sentences decorated the sides.
“Honestly,” I said, looking around, “I expected something much worse.”
There was only one serious problem.
The whole house smelled strongly of dried fish, soaked meat, and sour milk. All three smells together were almost unbearable.
Before long, our host called from the kitchen.
“Come and eat!”
My uncle immediately went toward the kitchen.
“Food!”
I followed him.
The kitchen was built in a very old-fashioned way. A large stone in the middle of the room served as the fireplace, and a hole in the roof allowed the smoke to escape.
It was the kitchen, dining room, and living room all at once.
When we entered, our host stepped forward ceremoniously.
“Saellvertu,” he said.
The word meant something like, “Be happy.”
Then he kissed us both on the cheeks.
His wife came forward and did exactly the same.
Afterward, the husband and wife placed their right hands over their hearts and bowed deeply.
I soon discovered that this woman was the mother of nineteen children.
Nineteen!
They were everywhere.
Some crawled, some walked, and some simply rolled around on the floor. Smoke from the fireplace filled the room, and every now and then I saw another little white head appear through the haze.
My uncle and I quickly became friendly with the whole family.
Before we knew what was happening, several children had climbed onto our shoulders. Others sat on our luggage, while the rest clung to our legs.
The ones who could speak kept shouting, “Saellvertu! Saellvertu!”
They said it in every possible tone.
The younger children could not speak yet, but they certainly knew how to make noise.
Then supper was announced.
At that moment, Hans returned after taking care of the horses.
He had left them outside to graze on the short vegetation of the Icelandic plains. There was very little for them to eat—mostly moss and dry, poor grass.
Yet somehow, they were always ready to travel again the next morning.
“Welcome,” Hans said.
Then, with his usual calm expression, he kissed the host, his wife, and all nineteen children.
He showed exactly the same expression every time, as if he were a machine performing the same task again and again.
When the ceremony was finally over, we sat down for supper.
There were twenty-four of us around the table.
It was a tight squeeze.
“The lucky ones only have two children sitting on their knees,” I remarked.
But as soon as the soup appeared, everyone became quiet.
Our host filled our bowls with soup made from Icelandic moss, or lichen. Surprisingly, it tasted quite good.
Then came a huge piece of fish swimming in sour butter.
After that, we had skyr, a thick food made from curds and whey, served with biscuits and juniper-berry juice.
Our drink was blanda, a mixture of skimmed milk and water.
I was so hungry that I even finished a large bowl of thick oatmeal for dessert.
After the meal, the children disappeared.
The adults gathered around the fireplace, where the fuel consisted of turf, heather, cow dung, and dried fish bones.
Once everyone had warmed themselves, they went off to bed.
Our hostess offered to remove our stockings and trousers for us, following the local custom.
“We can manage ourselves,” my uncle said politely.
She accepted our refusal and left us alone with our beds of dry hay.
At five the next morning, we said goodbye to our generous hosts.
My uncle had great difficulty persuading them to accept proper payment for their hospitality.
Hans finally gave the signal to leave.
We had barely traveled a hundred yards from Gardar when the landscape suddenly changed.
The ground became wet and marshy, making the journey much harder.
To our right, a long line of mountains stretched endlessly into the distance, like a massive natural fortress. We traveled along the lower slopes.
Again and again, we came across streams and small rivers that we had to cross without getting our luggage wet.
The farther we went, the emptier the land became.
Yet occasionally, we saw human figures moving in the distance.
One day, the trail suddenly brought us close to one of them.
I recoiled at the sight.
The man had a swollen head with shiny, hairless skin. His body was covered in terrible wounds, which could be seen through his torn clothes.
What shocked me most was that he did not come toward us to ask for money.
Instead, he ran away.
Hans raised his hand.
“Saellvertu!”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Spetelsk,” Hans replied.
“A leper,” my uncle explained.
The very word made me shudder.
Leprosy, which modern medicine had almost eliminated in many places, was still common in Iceland. It was believed to be hereditary rather than contagious, and people suffering from it were forbidden to marry.
Seeing those poor people made our journey even more depressing.
The landscape itself seemed lifeless.
The last patches of grass were disappearing beneath our feet. There were no trees, except for a few tiny willows no bigger than blackberry bushes.
Occasionally, a falcon appeared in the gray, misty sky, flying toward warmer and sunnier lands.
I felt deeply homesick.
“I wish I were back home,” I thought.
I longed for my native country.
And I missed Gretchen terribly.
We had to cross several small fjords.
Eventually, we reached a much larger gulf.
The tide was high, but fortunately it was possible to cross immediately.
About a mile farther on, we reached the little village of Alftanes.
That evening, we crossed two rivers, the Alfa and the Heta. Both were full of trout and pike.
By then, we had no choice but to spend the night in an abandoned house.
It looked like the perfect place for every ghost in Scandinavian mythology to gather.
“The King of Cold lives here,” I joked.
He certainly seemed to.
The cold kept us company all night.
The next day passed without any particular event.
The ground remained wet and swampy.
The landscape never seemed to change.
Everything was gray, empty, and painfully monotonous.
That evening, after completing half of our planned journey, we spent the night at the Annexia of Krosolbt.
For nearly a mile, the ground beneath our horses was nothing but lava.
The Icelanders called this kind of landscape hraun.
The broken lava looked strange. In some places, it lay stretched across the ground like enormous ship ropes. In others, it was twisted into great coils and piles.
An immense field of lava had flowed down from the surrounding mountains.
Those mountains were now extinct volcanoes, but their remains clearly showed what they had once been.
Here and there, steam rose from hot springs.
I would have liked to stop and examine these wonders.
But my uncle had no patience for sightseeing.
“We have to keep moving,” he said.
Soon the lava disappeared, and the soft, wet ground returned beneath the horses’ feet.
Every hundred yards or so, we passed another small lake.
We were now traveling west.
We had gone around the great Bay of Faxa, and the twin white peaks of Sneffels were less than five miles away.
The horses began moving faster.
The rough ground no longer slowed them down.
I was exhausted.
My body was beginning to suffer badly from the journey.
But my uncle remained as strong as he had been on the first day.
Hans was just as tireless.
I could not help admiring both of them.
To them, this difficult expedition seemed no more tiring than an ordinary walk.
On Saturday, June 20, at six in the evening, we finally reached Budir, a small town beautifully situated beside the ocean.
As soon as we arrived, Hans asked for his payment.
My uncle paid him immediately.
But we were not finished with Icelandic hospitality.
This time, we were welcomed by Hans’s own relatives—his uncles and cousins.
They received us warmly and gave us everything we needed.
After such a difficult journey, I would have loved to stay there and rest.
Unfortunately, my uncle had no interest in resting.
“Tomorrow we continue,” he said.
“Tomorrow is Sunday,” I reminded him.
“It makes no difference.”
And so, once again, I had to climb onto my horse.
The land soon changed again because of the mountains.
Granite rocks pushed out of the ground like the tops of ancient trees.
We were now traveling around the enormous base of the great volcano.
My uncle could not take his eyes off Sneffels.
He kept staring at it and gesturing toward its enormous slopes.
There was almost a challenge in his expression.
“That is the giant,” he seemed to be saying, “and I intend to conquer it.”
After four hours of steady travel, our horses suddenly stopped.
We had arrived at the door of the presbytery at Stapi.