You'll never believe it, but my first response was an inward groan. Although I wasn't asleep yet, the descent into dreamland was most definitely in my immediate plans as I made one last languid scroll on the back of my camera through the evening's adventure at Eystrahorn, just a few miles along the road from our cottage. Jumping out of the warm cosy bed in which I was so snugly cocooned to rush from my generously heated bedroom outside and into the subarctic night was by no means on the agenda. Not one bit. Not even slightly. We'd had a long and successful day and now it was bedtime - 12:30am kind of bedtime at that too. But then again there had been that knock on my bedroom door, accompanied by an urgent and excited announcement from Lee. "It's started again," he sang through the door. Seconds later I heard the front door opening. He was already out there, disappearing into the night.
An hour earlier it had been my turn. Lee had already headed to bed, while Mr Night Owl here was finding sleep harder to come by and had resorted to uploading the day's images into the cloud to ensure that even if the plane went down and I had to involuntarily surrender my cameras to the icy Atlantic waters, at least I'd be able to work with their legacy on my return home. Once we'd been picked up by a lonely trawler with an extra large hold of course. As I made my final foray to the kitchen for a glass of water, I looked through the window into the inky black night. At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me as it took a few moments to realise that a patch of sky that was neither inky nor black might just be the icing on the day's already richly decorated cake. "Lee, wake up," I threw over my shoulder as I headed for the front door. "I think it's the Aurora."
And that's exactly what it was. Faint but distinctly green patterns covered a small area of the sky to the east and north, shifting in and out of the blackness. Never more than a small patch of the night was filled with green at any one time, but we knew this might be it as we raced out into the dark long grass in front of the cottage, hastily assembling cameras onto tripods and trying to remember the lessons we'd learned about night time photography in the long gone days of occasionally entertaining ourselves with star trails. "Aperture wide open, ISO high as you dare, and remember the five hundred rule so the stars don't blur." Fifteen minutes later we'd agreed that the show was over, and returned to our beds, content that for the first time ever, we'd witnessed the Northern Lights; that afterthought we'd written down on the Iceland trip masterplan along the lines of "Watch the app, and stay alert at night, just in case."
But this time it was Lee who'd stayed alert and peered through his window at the back of the cottage towards the north. This time I was the one who was dragged from his bed as a welter of belated enthusiasm overcame that initial refusal to budge from underneath a warm duvet. Throwing my coat over my pyjamas and pulling my boots onto bare feet, I followed him out into the night once more, where I was greeted by a sight that took stole my words and stopped me in my tracks. Where before there had been the odd green streak, there were now huge drifts, filling large areas of the sky with dancing and glowing magnificence. At least the camera settings were still in situ from an hour earlier, but where had the buttons on my head torch gone? Realising that in my haste I'd put it on upside down I tried to switch it on, selecting the right hand button to engage a pointless pair of red flashing lights instead of the solid white beam I needed to see the controls on my camera. As I moved over the unlit grass I almost tripped over my tripod, the legs of which had remained extended from episode one. Calm and controlled? I'll let you be the judge. Strangely, the one thing I can't remember was whether or not it was cold out there.
We needn't have panicked though. The night was on our side, giving us a display that lasted for more than half an hour, the sky becoming ever more filled with the mysterious green light, hanging in ethereal curtains over the mountains behind us like a gateway to another world, moving subtly from one part of the sky to next without us noticing. Fading almost to blackness and then rebuilding brightly, it seemed as if they were softly breathing as they gazed down at us like gods upon mortals in silent benevolence. What a surreal experience to stand beneath the stars, wearing your jimjams in a land whose story was built upon the sagas handed down over more than a thousand years, where your imagination can roam across those mountains into a universe that you thought only existed in the writings of Tolkien, CS Lewis and Philip Pullman. In a place like this, at a moment like this, the distance between fiction and reality can become blurred to the point that you no longer know which is which. Very much in the same way that you no longer know which button operates which light sequence on your head torch when you put it on in a terrible hurry.
Just after one o clock, exhilarated and beyond any hope of getting meaningful sleep, we took one final look at the sky, where the greens had receded once more and given way to the stars on the black and indigo canvas in front of us. We'd hadn't come to Iceland with any real hope of seeing the Aurora, but here in this remote farmstead, more than twenty miles from the nearest small town, we'd had our moment. Although the show was forecast to return more strongly the following night, we never saw it again. But it didn't matter. I'd taken photos in my jimjams and seen a night sky I'd remember forever. What more could we ask for on this fantastic adventure that seemed to get better and better with every passing day?
