The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2006, Qupperneq 29

Vol. 60 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
71
Beginning our hike at Hornvik
weave and wind its wild way over sheer
granite mountains, across desolate treeless
heaths with their solitary orange emer-
gency huts, and down and around deep and
craggy fjords, each with its own tiny fish-
ing village at the bottom. For half the dis-
tance to Isafjordur, we are boundlessly
grateful to be diverted from our terror by
our affable and knowledgeable travel com-
panion, now pointing out a forbidding grey
stone figure looming out of the fog whom
he identifies as Floki, the Norwegian guid-
ed to this part of Iceland by a trio of ravens,
and then showing us his favourite waterfall,
Dynjandi (“resounding”), a spectacular
series of ever widening cascades, the effect
of the whole like some aqueous garment, a
watery veil. But all too soon we are at his
home, Hrafnseyri, on Arnarfidur, yet
another of the many fjords serrating the
west coast. He leaves us with the news that
the place where he lives was the birthplace
of Jon Sigurdsson, Iceland’s most ardent
nationalist.
A moment later the van starts up, and
we are once again climbing up from the
fjord to yet another lonely moor. Until
now, we have had the road to ourselves,
but here we overtake a rental car which has
pulled off and stopped, and we know
instinctively why we chose not to drive
ourselves. Shortly after, rounding a rough
and steep mountain slope, we meet a sec-
ond car and simply avert our eyes from the
edge. If anything, the sense of danger
enhances the effect of the extreme beauty
we are witnessing and, conscious that our
camera is useless in a speeding vehicle, we
seem to intuit that each of us is making his
or her own memories of this day.
Suddenly, just when I have been lulled
into a sort of acceptance of the bizarre
rhythms of our journey, we are hurtling
forward into darkness. I feel as though I’m
in a fairy tale as the van disappears deeper
and deeper into a chasm rough hewn out of
mountainous ochre rock. As if in a dream,
we seem to go on forever, until strangest of
all, we come to an intersection.. To my sur-
prise, I realize that we could turn left under
this mountain. But we don’t, and a few
minutes later, emerge to the welcome lights
of Isafjordur in the valley below.
In the morning, we actually wake
refreshed, in our comfortable, if unremark-
able concrete hotel on the town square, and