The Germans left the hut at first light, tiptoeing out before the chaos of breakfast and furniture-moving began. They waved as they passed my mattress, whispering, ‘Enjoy more camping.’
An hour later Lauri stood on the raised wooden decking outside the hut, hugging each of us as we passed her.
‘Be careful today, it looks nice now but it’s going to rain later. Just follow the river downhill, you can’t go wrong.’
We descended the mountain over a blank, featureless, rock-strewn land, falling into silence as the hillside folded ahead and the glacier retreated behind. We’d found our rhythm, an easy pace on the last day. Or was it because we were going downhill? We finally found the river as Lauri said we would. A frantic rush of muddy meltwater, racing downhill beneath a small wooden bridge, erected in memory of a man who had tried to cross the river here but didn’t make it and was washed away towards the valley, miles below. I hesitated on the wooden platform above the water as it burst into brown spume over the boulders. Nothing could have made me step into that wild river.
Dave squatted behind a boulder and boiled water for tea as a fine drizzle began to fall. Before the stove was packed away the beat of rain on waterproofs began to drown out the sound of the river. Muffling the volume of millions of gallons of water as it fell through a cascade of waterfalls, increasing in drama, height and width as it went. Water from the sky, underfoot and in deep echoing ravines. Everything was water. Beyond the desolate fields of rock and ash crowning the volcano’s summit, pockets of bacterial mush became patches of peat, then a blanket of soil. Below the icy reach of the glaciers, protected by sheltering cliff walls, tentative fingers of green growth stretched away from the water. The earth underfoot transformed into the landscape of foothills, a familiar world where the green threads massed and spread into blankets of coarse grass and thrift.
Moth walked on ahead through the cold, driving rain. Walking alone in his own world, on his own path. As the waterfalls grew in size the noise increased in volume until all we could hear was water. Water in a furious, pounding roar against rocks, clothes and earth. A maelstrom of noise and moisture, turning the peat soil into a moving conveyor of treacherous mud. But still Moth walked on, the distance between us growing.
People began to file past in ones and twos, then in groups and columns of school trips. We were getting closer to Skógar, to the cafés and buses where day trips to the waterfalls start and end. Nearly running on the slimy pathway, I caught up with Moth.
‘What’s the rush? I can’t keep up with you!’
‘What? I can’t hear you – it’s so loud.’
‘What’s … the … rush?’
‘What do you mean? I’m not rushing. I was just walking, remembering bits of the path from the last few days.’
‘Maybe that’s how you should always walk then, without thinking about it. Maybe you need headphones, so your movements become more automatic; perhaps the problems are in the connections between thought and action.’
‘I can’t wear headphones in the wild, I’d rather listen to the silence.’
‘No chance of that here.’
Two women walked uphill towards us, wiry women with bright-coloured clothing. Mustard-coloured waxed waterproofs jackets and red trousers, with wide brimmed hats tied on with beaded cord, which hadn’t come from the hangers in any outdoor shop I’d seen. They stopped on the path ahead, watching us walk towards them.
‘Hi, lovely day.’
‘Guten morgen.’ Germans. ‘It is not lovely, it is raining.’
‘You’re right, it is.’
‘What did you say?’
‘It’s raining.’
‘So you’ve noticed. My friend and I, we think we know you.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Yes, this man, we’ve met, but we can’t remember … we know your face.’
‘No, I really don’t think so.’
They continued to stare with puzzled expressions as we walked away.
‘So, Moth, secret life in Germany then?’
‘Don’t know what they’re talking about. Great coats though.’ We looked back and they were still standing on the brow of the hill watching us.
The waves of land shallowed and the river broadened as I followed Moth, disappearing rapidly ahead of me down the hillside. Maybe there was something in what the women had said: a secret trip to Germany in the past, possibly. Or was he walking alone because he was bored with my trivial conversation, or lack of it? Tired of talking about boy-scout badges and food, he just wanted to be alone. I waited for Dave and Julie, who were walking carefully on the slippery grass.
‘What’s up with him, like, what’s the rush?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t keep up with him. I think he’s bothered by the German women.’
‘What?’
Moth was waiting for us on a viewing platform at the top of the final waterfall. The vast Skógafoss waterfall thundered down to a riverbed sixty metres below, where busloads of tourists stood, photographing themselves in the cloud of spray that formed as the water landed. Two Icelandic trails behind us, we had walked through ice, rain and sulphur to the end of a strange and unknown land. To a cliff edge that used to be the end of the land, before sea levels fell and took the coastline three miles further out to sea. Folk tales say this is the place where the Viking Prasi Porolfsson dragged his boat ashore for the first time and buried a chest of gold, obviously just travelling money, in a cave behind the roaring power of Skógafoss. A bus trip of Chinese girls clearly thought it was still there, but appeared from the spray empty-handed and dripping in their plastic ponchos.
‘Don’t you want to walk with us today, like, or do you fancy catching the bus back to Reykjavík this afternoon?’
We all stood by the railings, squeezing together for a selfie at the falls.
‘Course not. It’s my legs, I had to just go with them.’
I’d been too focused on the thought of the strange German women – I hadn’t considered that he might be having a problem going downhill. Struggling to put the brakes on.
‘Could hardly have left them behind, like.’
‘They felt real today, like my old legs, as if I was completely in control. I had to go with it, seize that sense of normality and go with it. Sorry, didn’t mean to ignore anyone.’
‘No, Moth, if you have a moment when life is in balance you seize it and forget us.’ Julie handed out the last of the chocolate raisins.
At the bottom of the fall, feeling tiny against the backdrop of wild power, we asked one of the girls in ponchos to take our photo. We leapt into the air, all the wrong side of middle age, seizing a moment of life in defiance of infinity, or because of it. A moment of the wild, loud cacophony of life caught in flight. Two fulmars circled in the currents of the air above the waterfall as we breathed in the empty volcanic possibility. There, where the earth begins and ends and life goes on in another form.
The daily bus had long gone as we pitched the tents by the river, sat in the warm dry café and ordered food. Logging in to Wi-Fi for the first time in Iceland, I scanned through an enormous list of unanswered emails. Among them was one from the literary agent. The Salt Path had reached the top ten in the German book charts and had been featured in a widely read magazine. A selfie that we had taken, homeless but laughing near Godrevy Lighthouse on the South West Coast Path, was all over the magazine racks of Germany.