Iceland's Otherworldly Beauty - NYTimes.com This season's starkly powerful silhouettes hold their own against Iceland's extreme landscape of jagged lava fields, mossy hills and shining white glaciers. Iceland isn't just a country - it's a mood, a waking dream, an alternate realm of cliffs and moss, a place where you can still experience the sublime, that shiver of fear in the face of monumental nature. A field of flammable moss - gray-green, like the ocean on a stormy day, stretching away under a sky the color of ice. On the first morning I woke on this remote island, it was all I could see. About 315,000 people live here among eerie rock formations and shining glaciers, but the landscape is so austere and weird, you might think that you had woken in an outpost in an alien world. One imagines, at every turn, the darting movements of the hidden people ("Huldufolk") among the crags. In "Journey to the Center of the Earth," Jules Verne wrote that the entrance to a subterranean passage was on Iceland's Snaefellsnes peninsula. It's easy to see why he would have imagined this. To visit is to be enveloped in a physical landscape so extreme that visions of it invade even your sleep. Along the steepest mountainsides, small horses stick like burrs, grazing where no American horse could maintain its balance. Iceland is a place of contradictions, at once archaic and modern, immensely gray yet strangely lush, covered in various mosses and bright green grasses, which thrive even amid stark lava fields. Everyone is known by first name, even the president. Icelandic people have one of the highest life expectancies in the world, and one of the best state health-care systems. But get past the immediate environs of Reykjavik, and you emerge into a chthonic world, a place of raw rock and ice dipping over the edges of mountains; it's easy, on these plains, to imagine the Vikings building their villages, launching their ships. At the national park, Thingvellir (spelled slightly differently in Icelandic, which still uses two letters from Old Norse), you can touch the mounded remnants of the booths from the Vikings" annual gatherings. It was here that the first Icelandic council originally met in 930 A.D., and where every year an elected member read the nation's laws out loud to the people. The past is present everywhere: signs on the road point you to the former homes of characters from "The Sagas of Icelanders," a set of interlocking prose narratives about life in the Middle Ages here, which remain central in the culture. At Gullfoss ("Golden Falls"), the island's most spectacular waterfall, it is said that the falls get their yellow glow and their name from a man centuries ago who buried his gold when he died, not wanting anyone to have it. In late summer, the light fades slowly, reluctantly. On the Ring Road - Iceland's main "highway," circling the island - waterfalls continuously pour and scores of sheep roam free, without dogs to guard them or fences to bound them. The Icelandic horses sleep on their sides - at first glance, they look dead - as their impossibly long manes lift in the wind. The vista is still, vast, apocalyptic. Hardship breeds companionability. Everyone in Iceland - at least outside of the city - is friendly. At last count, 121 people occupy the nation's jails. And apparently many of them are allowed home for Christmas. There are few, if any, places where volcanoes are such a living presence. Since 2010, there have been two eruptions here. At Dyrholaey, a dramatic stone arch extends out from the dark lava cliffs, as white foam waves crash along the black sand beach below, the land and water in stark contrast. In the distance, majestically, stands Reynisdrangar, a famous rock formation that looks like something from "Game of Thrones," which filmed some scenes nearby. A search-and-rescue ranger, pointing out wild blueberries growing at the bottom of the nearby mountain (tart, tiny, delicious) told me that for some farmers the volcanic eruption of 2011 was good - about a fifth of an inch of lava acted as a mineral-rich fertilizer. Any more and "phht," he said, shaking his head. The Icelanders still tell stories and make folk metaphors about the world around them. One day I drove to Jokulsarlon (literally, "glacial-river-lagoon") - a sublime, unearthly glacial lake studded with broken pieces of glacier, which float, blue and shining, among waters where seals play. With a handful of others, I got in a flotation suit and climbed onto a tiny rubber pontoon boat. Our guide - a young Icelandic woman who loved the ice as one might love the beach - took us unnervingly close to the glacier's edge. Dark blue and ash-striped icebergs drifted past us like boats from the underworld. As we turned for the harbor, our guide got a little dreamy. "Use your imagination," she told us, gazing out, "to really look at the ice shapes, to see what they resemble - animals and spirits." In Iceland the geology is primary, humans are secondary. We are used to living our lives as if we are in control, predicting this and manufacturing that. In Iceland you are aware at every turn of your smallness, the irrational, slow forces at work. The glaciers seem alive, like sentient entities. To be here is to be returned to a child's sense of precarious awe: How on earth did this come to be? Even here, changes encroach. One day, I hiked at Falljokull ("Falling Glacier"), near Vatnajokull National Park. Like all the ice in Iceland, the glacier is shrinking rapidly. It used to creep forward every winter. Then it began retreating. First 9 yards. Then 21 yards. Now, the guides estimate, it is losing up to 37 yards a year. Nearby, at the Grand Guesthouse Gardakot - a pristine farm near the dramatic cliffs at Dyrholaey - the host, Eva, who also worked as a ranger, explained her worries about the puffin colony nearby. "There was no snow last winter," she said. This summer, some of the puffins left, suddenly - abandoning their eggs. Here, as elsewhere in Iceland, the hospitality felt natural, as if you were visiting friends of friends. Over breakfast, Eva talked about growing up on the neighboring farm; her husband grew up in Vik, the nearest town. Unlike many young Icelanders, who head to Reykjavik, they chose to stay in the country. On the way to the rental car drop off near the airport, I got lost; as I was pulling up, a white compact swept past us, and a bright-eyed young man jumped out. "Are you Meghan?" he asked. I'm from the rental car agency. I have your scarf," he said, and handed me a plastic bag. I'd left it five days ago. I have to rush off and do a drop in Reykjavik. In fact," he continued, "if you're going to the airport, your should just drive there yourselves, and leave the car in the parking lot." What will I do with the keys? "Oh," he said, "just leave the doors unlocked and the keys inside." He spread his arms and smiled. It's Iceland!