Free Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

that year and the eruption in the Westmann Islands
was finished. Markus’s childhood home had actually been buried some time
during the first month of the eruption; nonetheless Thóra wanted to make
sure that nothing got past her so she didn’t stop reading until she came
to the headline ‘Eruption Finished!’‘ from 4 July.
    Upon reading, she found little that could
conceivably be connected to the corpses in the basement. The airplane Vor, with
five people on board, had crashed at the end of March north of Langjokull
Glacier, and in the first article about the incident, the crash site had still
not been located. A later article about the accident stated that rescue crews
had found it, as well as the plane’s passengers, who all turned out to be
dead. Another article that caught Thóra’s attention was from the
end of January, concerning the loss of the British smack Cuckoo, along with its
four-man crew. It had sailed from Thórlakshofn in the middle of the
month, but nothing was heard from it or its crew after that. Thóra sat
up on the sofa as she read this article, but lay back down again when several
pages later she read that wreckage from the ship had been driven ashore along
with remains of one of the crew’s bodies. The smack was thought to have
capsized with all hands in a storm that hit shortly after it left the harbour.
Thóra’s attention was captured again later in the book when she
read that a group of six hikers had got lost after setting out on a trip from
Landmannalaugar. The group had consisted of four foreign geologists and two
Icelandic guides who were supposed to have been very familiar with the area.
Thóra did not need to waste any time trying to imagine how part of the
group had sought shelter in a basement in the Westmann Islands to get away from
bad weather on the mainland, because immediately on the following page there
was a report that the men had been found hounded and cold in a little emergency
hut in the highlands. They had got lost in the drifting snow and could thank
their lucky stars that they had stumbled on the hut. Thóra then read one
report about people who had disappeared and were never found. In February, the
Seastar had sunk southeast of the mainland with a ten-man crew. The passengers
boarded two rubber life rafts but were never found. The group had consisted of
nine men and one woman: five Icelanders and five Faeroese, and despite repeated
searches through the articles Thóra could not discover anything about
whether the crew had ever been found. The only problem was that Markus’s
home had probably already been buried in ash by the time the ship perished,
and it was an enormous distance to the Islands from the place where it had
sunk.
    Despite her disappointment Thóra
continued reading, then found an article that
reawakened her hope. It concerned the huge number of foreign reporters that had
come to Iceland to cover the eruption. Of course there was nothing in the
article about any of them disappearing, much less four of them. Although it was
unlikely that any full-time journalists or reporters had failed to return from
Iceland without it ending up in the news, it was possible that things might
have been different for freelancers. Some of these reporters might have
travelled to Iceland without letting anyone know of their plans. They would
perhaps not have been searched for here when their disappearance was discovered
later in their homelands.
    Little else had occurred in the first part of
the year that could shed any light on the identity of the corpses. The Cod War
raged, but Thóra could find no indication anywhere that anyone had
disappeared or been considered lost at sea in connection with the conflict
between the British and the Icelanders over the extension of Iceland’s
territorial waters from twelve miles to fifty. Several other articles
mentioned deaths or disappearances, but they were never groups of people,
always isolated individuals. Thóra thought it too