Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Ashes To Dust

‘Is that what they say?’ said Kjartan, with a pleased smirk. ‘I don’t know about that, but I am familiar with this case of Markus’s.’ He did not take his eyes off Thóra. ‘This is a small place. Every single person here knows pretty much everything about the discovery of the bodies, both what’s been written about in the papers and the aspects that aren’t being discussed in public.’

Thóra smiled reluctantly. It was to be expected. The Westmann Islands were inhabited by nearly four thousand people in approximately thirteen square kilometres, so the story must have circulated very quickly. Now she just had to hope that the same had occurred with the story behind the corpses. ‘What exactly happened here in the Islands the night of the eruption, and the day before Markus’s home was buried by ash? Markus has told me what he remembers, but naturally he was just a teenager, so he was sent to the mainland straight away that night. I understand that he didn’t return to the Islands until some time had passed, and by then his house was gone.’

‘I suppose you’re hoping to hear that someone besides Markus went down into the basement?’ asked Kjartan. He rocked back and forth on his office chair, which creaked.

‘I’m interested in knowing whether it might be at all possible to rule out such a thing,’ answered Thóra cautiously. She had to be careful not to let the old man turn the meeting into an opportunity to satisfy his own curiosity. ‘If you could perhaps explain to me how all this happened, and try to remember anything that might be important for Markus’s case?’

‘I don’t know whether what I remember could help Markus in any way.’ Kjartan leaned forward quickly. His chair creaked again. ‘I would hope so – I like the boy. His father and I were great friends. He was never called anything other than“Krusi krona” here in the old days, since he used to go on and on about money.’

Thóra smiled. It had been decades since Markus had been a boy, but in the mind of this man he seemed to have stayed at that age. ‘Still, it would be good to hear your side of the story. One never knows what details will be revealed,’ she said. ‘How did it start? As far as I know, the eruption began without warning.’

Now it was Kjartan’s turn to smile.‘The eruption on Surtsey was a clear warning, in my opinion.’ He reached out to the wall behind him and took down a framed map of the Islands. The map was faded and dusty; Kjartan blew most of the dust off, then pointed at Surtsey and ran his finger along the islands that lined up in a horseshoe from Surtsey to Heimaey itself. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the volcanic belt is located here. It isn’t a great distance,’he said, placing his little finger on Heimaey and his thumb on Surtsey. ‘About thirteen, fourteen nautical miles.’ He laid the map on the desk in front of him. ‘The Surtsey eruption began in 1963, and Eldfell blew in 1973. Ten years is a short time on the scale of geological history.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Thóra.‘But it’s still quite a long time for human beings. So the inhabitants of the Westmann Islands stopped worrying about eruptions sometime after the upheaval on Surtsey ended?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’said Kjartan. ‘Actually the only warning that people got was several small earthquakes the evening before the eruption started. No one paid much attention to them, since people thought the tremors came from the area where they’d recently finished constructing the Búrfell power plant. Now I’m no specialist in quakes, but I was told that one of the three seismographs set up to record the movements of the earth’s crust was broken, making it impossible to determine their epicentre with any great precision. Not a single person put two and two together when they felt the tremors.’ Kjartan paused. ‘There were actually various other signs that no one paid any attention to,’ he added, avoiding her eyes.‘A woman who lived on the edge of town, at the place where the eruption began, was amazed to see that the elves were packing up and moving out two days before it started.’

‘Elves?’ repeated Thóra carefully. ‘I see.’ She decided to keep her opinion to herself where elves were concerned.

‘Yes, and several days earlier, a little girl told her parents that an eruption was about to happen at the place where the fissure was formed.’ Kjartan shrugged. ‘There are other stories like this, about unexplained events just prior to the disaster, but one never knows how much store to set by them. An amateur painter, for example, did a painting of the area showing the volcano and lava before these events occurred. I actually believe that some people can somehow sense catastrophes before they happen – just as animals seem to. However, I’m not one of them.’

Thóra silently thanked God for that small mercy. ‘Then the eruption started in the middle of the night?’

‘Yes,’ said Kjartan, seemingly relieved that Thóra didn’t want to talk about the supernatural.‘The fissure opened at two o’clock in the morning and started spewing lava. It wasn’t more than two hundred metres from the nearest farm, so it’s a miracle that everyone was saved.’

‘People must have been terrified,’ said Thóra. ‘I’ve never been near an eruption, but the noise must have been incredible.’

‘It might be hard to believe, but there wasn’t that much noise,’ he replied. ‘Most of those who lived nearest the site were woken by the noise, but many people who lived farther away had to be woken up. Police cars, fire engines and other vehicles drove around the streets of the town with their sirens on, to warn people. A little later the decision was made to evacuate the Islands, and people were asked to go down to the harbour. Most people didn’t need to be told twice, and for some reason most of them had flocked down there anyway. A few people, however, had to be persuaded to leave.’

‘Didn’t they realize the danger they were in?’ asked Thóra. ‘I’d have thought a spouting volcano in your back garden might be pretty persuasive.’

‘Of course it was the middle of the night, and people were still a bit sleepy. Some people thought there was a fire; the first person to see the eruption called the police and reported one. He was the farmer in Kirkjubasr, and the fissure went through his farm. Just over two kilometres long, if you can imagine it.’ Kjartan appeared almost proud that this hadn’t simply been a little tourist eruption. ‘Now, others thought that some sort of war had broken out. The Cold War was in full force by then – as was the Cod War, of course. And keep in mind that the present-day landscape is deceiving and you can’t really tell what happened from how it looks now.

The Eldfell cone didn’t exist at that time – it was formed in the eruption. It was just flat land, and suddenly a row of lava spouts appeared out of the earth. From a distance they could very well have appeared to be burning buildings, or a big grass fire. And of course, everyone reacts differently in a crisis.‘Kjartan smiled to himself, remembering. ’I ended up talking a woman out of her house, which was very close to the fissure vent. She had got up and started making pancakes! We had a hell of a job persuading her to put down her pan.‘

Thóra laughed. She noticed that Bella was sitting there as if fossilized; she’d not moved a muscle since sitting down. Thóra didn’t know whether that was good or bad; either the girl was paying rapt attention, or she was miles away. ‘But in the end you got everyone off the Islands?’

‘Yes, we did. We managed to get everyone up and on the move in about an hour, and people made their own way down to the harbour. The weather had been unfit for sailing the day before, so the entire fishing fleet was in the port. Otherwise enormous carnage would have occurred, since it was only a short time from the start of the eruption until red-hot ash and debris started raining over the town. Tephra, it’s called. That made everything much more dangerous.’ Kjartan leaned back.‘Those of us on the rescue crews really had to run for it. It looked as if the lava would close the harbour, since the fissure reached all the way down to the seaward approach at Ystaklettur Cliff. We were in a really tight spot -we needed to get five thousand people out of there. Not to mention the sheep and chickens.’