‘Good idea.’
Siggi left the table and went back to the counter while Iris munched on her last piece of croissant, thinking that this might be the best day out she’d had in a while and it hadn’t even started yet.
Siggi came back to the table, put his backpack on the chair and began putting his coat on.
‘We will need to walk to the office. Jonas is letting us take the jeep.’
‘So which volcano are we visiting?’ Iris asked as they made their way back along the road the way they’d come.
‘It’s Fagradalsfjall.’
‘Wow, that’s really exciting,’ Iris said, recognising the name. ‘I think it might be the only time I’ve visited a volcano and it wasn’t for work.’
‘That is the same for me,’ Siggi said, after a thoughtful pause.
‘You don’t feel like you’re taking me on one of your tours?’
‘Not at all. Unless you want me to give you a running commentary on the drive. Then I would feel like I was at work.’
‘No, that’s okay. I don’t think I’m recovered enough to bear that.’
As it was, Siggi ended up pointing out all sorts of things to Iris. They even pulled over a couple of times so that he could show her something of interest. A waterfall, which was running but still had vast swathes of ice clinging to the rock next to where the water cascaded over the edge. There were plumes of steam emerging from the lying snow at the sides of the road as they drove through the wintery landscape and enormous boulders, seemingly dumped in the middle of nowhere, where they had been discarded by a glacier flow thousands of years ago.
‘I can’t believe I’ve never been to Iceland before,’ said Iris.
‘How is that possible? For a volcanologist, it must be the best place in the world.’
‘I’m focused on the data collection side of things more than the geology, so until a couple of years ago, I spent most of my time in the lab, monitoring and trawling through data. Now that I’m researching this new thing, I’ve only been out in the field for a couple of years. I have colleagues who spend a lot of time here, though.’
‘I cannot imagine being inside all the time.’
‘This is going to sound a bit weird, but when you get engrossed in the data, it’s like you’re seeing it happen in front of you.’
‘Wow. I also cannot imagine being so passionate about something.’
‘You don’t feel passionate about what you do?’
He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t feel like work, but I don’t think that’s the same thing.’
‘If you could do anything for a job, what would it be?’
‘I would be a pilot, ‘ he said, without missing a beat.
‘So you could see the world and get paid for it?’
‘I think the feeling of freedom would be amazing. Imagine living in an archipelago and being the pilot everyone relies on to get them from island to island. I don’t know where that place is.’
‘Maybe Scotland?’
‘Maybe somewhere warmer like Indonesia?’
‘Mmm, that would be better.’
‘Here we are.’ Siggi pulled off the road into a clearing that had been turned into a makeshift car park by spreading crushed-up lava, like gravel across the surface.
‘There’s a car park for the volcano?’
‘They cannot stop people from coming to see it, so they make it as safe as possible. It is better to do this than have people driving too close.’
