We took the seven o’clock ferry off the island this morning, and the weather had finally turned.

The day before we had seen the place through rain and low cloud, catching pieces of it between the fog. This morning, pulling out of the harbour, we got the rest. The cliffs and the bays came out clear, the green mountainsides above the town, and both volcanic cones standing plain against the sky, Helgafell and Eldfell, the old one and the young one. Twenty-four hours earlier we had stood at the foot of both and seen nothing at all.

It lasted about twenty minutes. Then the cloud came back down and the fog closed in behind us, and the island went away again.

But twenty minutes was enough. It was enough to see what the place actually looks like, and enough to know we had not been imagining it from the fragments. So this post is mostly pictures, because the island deserves them and yesterday could not give them. This is the Westman Islands as they are on a clear morning, from the deck of a ferry pulling away.