My guide,David,is a search-and-rescue specialist,which makes him aMission Impossible Ethan Hunt character in Iceland,I'd imagine. He has to rescue people from volcanoes,glaciers and wild oceans. He can ski and rappel and swing down from helicopters on winches to pluck people from danger.
As we lurch across the lava fields,he's full of dramatic rescue stories involving hapless tourists and isolated farmers.
Yet somehow none of this reassures me as I leap across a raging torrent in a glacial tunnel. David seems not like my potential saviour but a madman who has lured me into a nightmare. This isn't a pretty blue glacier,such as I've seen from the decks of cruise ships.
This is a groaning,collapsing glacier,dirty with debris,coughing up boulders the size of cars,and spitting out entire raging waterfalls of grey snow melt. This glacier is immense,brutal and not a little scary.
I'm in southern Iceland,where Solheimajokull Glacier – a tongue of the even more immense Myrdalsjokull Icecap – squats atop the country's most powerful volcano,hidden beneath 800 metres of ice. Every decade or so the volcano erupts below,causing massive flooding. We've parked our four-wheel drive on a field of black lava crunchy as cornflakes,and hiked up through patches of snow and pouring rain to the glacier's edge.
"Iceland isn't the land of ice and fire as you might imagine,more one of ash and muddy water,"says David glumly.
Solheimajokull has a certain beauty. The oldest ice is blue. Trapped ash forms swirling patterns,and basalt chips glitter like diamonds. You wouldn't call this a nice glacier,though. It's simply a heart-thumpingly impressive one. It looms from the mist like a great beast,roaring and gurgling. Its flanks are wounded with crevasses and pockmarked with sinkholes in which cauldrons of melt water swirl.