The Ground Boils

You smell it from inside the car with the windows up, half a kilometre before the turning.

Hverir is a few hectares of ground where the rock has been cooked by the steam coming up through it until it isn’t rock any more, just clay, and the clay is orange and grey and pale yellow in patches wherever the sulphur has come out. Nothing grows. Not moss, not the tough grass that grows on everything else in this country. The line where the vegetation stops is sharp enough to step over.

I got there just after eight, and the low sun was coming through the steam and lighting it from behind. The mud pools are the thing. They aren’t violent — they turn over slowly, in grey rings, and every few seconds one lets go a bubble the size of a fist and the surface makes a sound like porridge. Around the edge the mud has dried and cracked into a lip. Behind them the fumaroles along the ridge go continuously, straight up when there’s no wind, and there was no wind.

The whole field is the same temperature as an engine that has just been switched off, and it has been running for thousands of years.

You stay on the paths, and not because of a sign. The crust here is a crust. It looks like ground and in places it is a lid over water at well above boiling, and people have gone through it.

I photographed it for half an hour and then couldn’t get the smell out of my jacket for the rest of the trip. Every time I opened the camper it was there — sulphur, faintly, like a struck match. It became the smell of the north of the island.