The Ice That Hides Fire

Polly flew east until the black land turned white. Ahead of her lay the largest glacier in Europe, a sheet of ice so wide it makes its own weather. From above it looked like a frozen ocean, blue-white and silent. She landed on it gently, and the cold came straight up through her feet. Against all that white, her red head and blue-teal wings looked almost unreasonably bright, and her breath hung in the air in little clouds.

She found a way into a cave beneath the ice and gasped. The walls glowed a deep, impossible blue. This ice is not frozen water from last winter. It is snow that fell hundreds of years ago, pressed down by the snow above it until all the air was squeezed out, and ice with no air inside it drinks every colour of light except blue. A small river ran along the cave floor, melting and carving as it went.

Then Polly learned the strangest thing about this place. Under parts of the glacier sit volcanoes, still warm, still alive. Now and then one of them erupts beneath all that ice, melts an enormous amount of it at once, and sends a sudden flood roaring out across the plain. Fire and ice are not opposites here. They live one on top of the other.

At the glacier's edge Polly came to a quiet lagoon where great blue icebergs broke away and floated slowly toward the sea. Some washed back onto a beach of black sand and lay there shining like lost jewels. She climbed onto one small iceberg, sat very still as it turned in the cold water, and let it carry her gently nowhere at all.