A few hours later in Grudarfjordur the sky burst into life. The stage-shy northern lights had taken to the upper and were performing their magic act. Blades of green cut t through the sky in a wide arch, then convened, flowing from one shape to another without ever seeming to move. I stood there and watched and even Helgi stopped talking for a moment anyway. Helgi it soon became apparent, had almost single-handedly held Iceland together over the years. We drove through a village he had connected to Iceland's national grid, along a strip of coast where he had been engaged as a, over a mountain pass where he had broken down one winter night as a lorry driver, and past an aluminium smelting plant where, naturally, he had once been employed. And now Helgi, already to my mind the most important man in Iceland, was my guide for the next week. In the northern reaches of Scandinavia the Sami people believed that if you whistled beneath the northern lights you could coax them closer, and that they could sweep you away with them into the night sky. Helgi started whistling, Others had thought the lights were the glinting weapons of fallen viking warriors ascending to heaven.In Finish folklore a mythical fox once swept his tail across the snow, spraying it upwards into the night sky.
The rest of the week unfolded and I saw more whales and different coloured northern lights and sunrises, each time as though for the first . But Iceland's best-known treat was held back for the final hours of the trip. My last moments there were spent like many of the others, among lava fields and under a snowy sky. Only now I was squinting though not steam and splashing happily in silty water.