I have just returned from an utterly memorable two weeks in the stunning, extraordinary, landscapes of Iceland. I have never seen anything quite like it. Iceland is, quite simply, unique - and wonderful. There will undoubtedly be further bulletins, but for a start, a modest gallery.
(this, by the way, is the end of the lava flows from the 2014/2015 eruption of Bárðarbunga and Holuhraun in the central highlands)
and, after two weeks of daily practice and testing with a variety of patient Icelanders, I can now pronounce Eyjafjallajökull more or less correctly - if slowly.
Comments
Spectacularly beautiful. More, please.
It is a theatre floating through the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running like water, wave on wave,
Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed
To cloud transformed again, idly, the way
A season changes color to no end,
Except the lavishing of itself in change,
As light changes yellow into gold and gold
To its opal elements and fire’s delight,
Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence
And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space
The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.
The theatre is filled with flying birds,
Wild wedges, as of a volcano’s smoke, palm-eyed
And vanishing, a web in a corridor…
--Stevens, Auroras of Autumn
Thanks, Richard - and thanks for the wonderful and appropriate Wallace Stevens poem (that I was previously unaware of). I see that Reykjavik shut off its city lights last week so that people could enjoy the aurora - we had kept a routine nocturnal lookout, but it seems that our timing was slightly off…