We left the campground at Vík and headed east on Route 1, aiming to reach Laki, or camp near it, and go into the crater country tomorrow.

The drive put two great icecaps in view. Behind us to the west was Mýrdalsjökull, the ice over Katla that we had circled for days. Ahead to the east, growing as we drove toward it, was Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Iceland and in all of Europe. We had one of the great icecaps in the mirror and the greatest of all through the windscreen. And the whole day led toward one thing, the Laki eruption of 1783, the deadliest in Iceland’s recorded history, and the land it left behind.

The first stop was the Eldhraun lava field, which is that land. Eldhraun was made by the Laki eruption. Over eight months a line of craters, the Lakagígar, tore open across the highland and poured out around fourteen cubic kilometres of lava, covering some five hundred and sixty-five square kilometres. It is one of the largest lava flows in the world in the last thousand years, matched only by another Icelandic eruption, Eldgjá, a few centuries before it. The lava is old now, and a thick coat of grey-green moss has grown over it, so what you see is a soft rolling field of moss with the black rock underneath. We walked the marked path through it, the Gönguleið um Eldhraun. The moss takes decades to grow and does not come back once trodden. It is part of the Katla UNESCO Geopark.

The lava is the smallest part of what Laki did. The eruption put out an enormous cloud of poison gas, fluorine and sulphur, that settled over the whole country. It killed the grass, and then the livestock that ate the grass, and then the people who had nothing left to eat. The Icelanders call it the Haze Hardships, the Móðuharðindin. Around nine thousand people died, close to a quarter of everyone in Iceland at the time. It did not stop at Iceland. The haze spread across Europe, cooled the northern hemisphere for years, and failed harvests far from here, and by some accounts the hunger it caused helped bring on the French Revolution. One eruption, on this spot, reached that far. We were standing on the moss that grew over it.

Two stops broke up the drive after that. Fjaðrárgljúfur, a canyon up to a hundred metres deep and about two kilometres long, cut by a river at the end of the last ice age, with steep winding palagonite walls. It is close to Route 1 and popular, and there was a crowd. We walked the rim and moved on.

Then, once we had aired down and turned onto F206 toward Laki, Fagrifoss, the beautiful waterfall, about eighty metres tall over dark rock, with nobody else there.

We kept on up F206, but the day was running out and the road is slow. Rather than reach the craters late, we turned off to the Blágil campsite and stopped for the night. Tomorrow we go to Laki itself, the fissure that made all of this. Our campsite is embedded into this century old lava field.