Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

awesome sight, believe me.’
    They drove on; to their right lay the Westman Islands, volcanic cubes of rock scattered like dice across the sea. They crossed a broad river and skirted the southern edge of the mountain range.
Farms nestled in the shelter of the ridge, and horses dotted the meadows that lined the road. They passed a waterfall, a broad curtain of white slipping off a cliff edge, before turning off the
main road and heading upwards on a track. Soon they were on ice. The glacier.
    It was cool, Erika thought. It was also cloudy. In a moment they were in something close to a whiteout, snow beneath them and white water vapour all around them. Dúddi slowed down.
He appeared to be following the dozens of tyre tracks spreading across the ice.
    ‘Do you know where you’re going?’ Erika asked.
    ‘Sure,’ said Dúddi. ‘I just follow the tracks. But I’ve got my GPS here.’ He tapped the instrument mounted on the dashboard.
    Every now and then headlights would appear out of the mist, as a jeep made its way past them down the glacier.
    ‘Do they know something we don’t?’ Erika asked.
    ‘I guess the visibility’s not too good up there,’ Dúddi said.
    ‘Did you check the forecast?’ Ásta asked.
    ‘Er, no,’ said Dúddi. His confidence was crumbling.
    ‘Shouldn’t you check the forecast before you drive up a glacier?’ Erika asked.
    Dúddi slowed and turned to his passengers. Erika liked him; he was one of a small group of students who had taken it upon themselves to invite her to the University of Iceland the
previous year to speak at a conference on Internet censorship. He was a good-looking kid with an open, honest face that combined innocence with intelligence. And doubt. ‘Look, it’s not
guaranteed we’ll get good visibility,’ he said. ‘There’s a chance we might be wasting our time. But the clouds do come and go in the mountains. And believe me, it’s
worth it. Do you want me to turn around?’
    ‘Let’s go for it,’ said Nico. ‘We’ve come this far.’
    ‘Yeah, let’s go for it,’ said Franz. ‘This rocks.’
    Erika was beginning to wish she had never agreed to the jaunt. And Franz’s grasp of American college-kid slang was beginning to irritate her. But if they turned back now, it would be
disastrous as a morale-building exercise. Better to get up there and see nothing than not to try and never know what they had missed. ‘No, keep going, Dúddi,’ she said.
    They drove on. The wind was picking up; loose snow skipped across the tracks in front of them. They almost hit two snowmobiles that shot out of the mist towards them.
    ‘Hear that?’ said Nico.
    Over the roar of the jeep’s engine and the swish of snow, they could hear a distant crashing, which grew steadily louder.
    The volcano.
    ‘Blue sky!’ said Franz, craning his neck against the side window of the vehicle to look upwards. It was true; above them rips in the cloud revealed patches of blue, darkening now
that afternoon was slipping into evening.
    ‘We might still get lucky,’ said Dúddi. ‘We’re nearly there. Look at the snow.’ Patches of brown rock were emerging from beneath the snow and ice.
‘It’s the heat from the volcano.’
    The cloud thinned ahead of them to reveal a flat section of ice and rock on which a lone four-by-four and a couple of snowmobiles were parked. Dúddi eased his superjeep next to the other
vehicle. A man and a woman were sitting inside staring upwards into the mist.
    The team got out of the jeep. It sounded as if an angry monster was thrashing about just out of sight in the clouds. It was cold; the wind was biting. Everyone zipped themselves up in their snow
jackets and they walked as a group towards the bottom of a pile of rubble; Erika was very grateful for the coat Dúddi had borrowed for her from his sister. Despite the wind, she could smell
sulphur in the air.
    Then the curtain lifted.
    Erika looked up and saw the most astounding sight of her life. About three hundred yards ahead the monster was revealed: a churning mass of orange and red fire, spitting, exploding, pouring up
into the air with a steady rhythmic crash. It had eaten out the top of a small dome, creating a bubbling bowl of magma, over the rim of which a dribble of super-hot lava spilled, an orange river
burning its way through the ice of the glacier down to the side. Steam spewed out of the cauldron, and from fissures in the ridge all around them where smaller fires of stone