Now Sigur Ros are back with their follow-up record, which is officially untitled but universally referred to as “( )” after the die-cut symbols on the CD’s cover. “( )” follows the “Agaetis Byrjun” model of building beautiful crashing waves of sound underneath Jonsi Thor Birgisson’s arresting falsetto. Sigur Ros’ strange, ethereal music would be equally at home in a new-age spa and in your craggiest, iciest nightmares; it’s like the bastard offspring of Enya and Radiohead.

That Birgisson’s lyrics actually are unintelligible is fitting, perhaps, for a band that remains deliberately opaque; even the CD booklet’s pages are blank but for the faint image of bare tree limbs. Listeners are encouraged to visit the band’s Web site, where fans’ best guesses as to Birgisson’s lyrics are posted. Those interpretations that prove most popular will, according to the band, become the “official” lyrics.

The album’s eight songs, like the album itself, remain stubbornly untitled. Sigur Ros’ two years of touring behind this material, however, means that dedicated fans have identified the songs’ working titles from concert set lists and helpfully posted them across the Internet. It’s hard to imagine, though, that you’ll get any more out of Track Four — whose insistent drums give way to soaring guitar and then a quiet, tinkling keyboard interlude — if you know that it might be called “Njosnavelin,” a title that honestly sounds more like some kind of glacial track and field event than an appropriate tag for this mini-symphony of almost overwhelming majesty and despair.

Sigur Ros: “( )”

Real Audio: Track 4 from “( )”

Real Audio: Track 7 from “( )”

Windows Media: Track 1 [Video from live show]

Nobody has us dancing to weirder music — with new musicians, it’s usually dancing or weird, not both — than Björk. (It’s not the kind of dancing that gets you a date. You do it in your living room, curtains down.) The persistent novelty of her sound and personality has gotten the Icelandic singer/arranger stuck in our notions of new, and we can’t even hum more than a measure of her work. Björk belongs to that genre of musician that makes you feel genuinely odd. In 50 years, we will all talk about where we were when we heard that first song.

Before her recent and biggest fame — she verged on making the Oscars different, verged on making Lars von Trier’s film “Dancer in the Dark” tolerable — and before the steady, measured ascent that preceded that, Björk Gudmundsdottir was a girl among eight adults on a purple commune in Reykjavik.

She lived a long, quiet life there until she was 11, at which point she decided things were too slow and she’d become a great singer. So she did. With five years of music school under her belt, she entered a contest in 1977 and won a record contract. Her stepfather played guitar on the album, and it was soon a hit. Listen to her translation of “Fool on the Hill” — it’s the cutest Icelandic cover of a Beatles tune you’ll hear.

She was precocious and lovable, and the record company positioned her to be a child star, Iceland’s own Jackson 5 squeezed into a Gudmundsdottir 1. Instead, the 11-year-old, who comes from a working-class family, said no thank you. She slipped back out of the spotlight and stayed away for years.

As Björk describes it, her adolescent years were a saturation of Hendrix and Cream. She registered her boredom by leaving home and joining a punk band at 15. (Her parents probably saw it coming: At 7 or 8, she approached the adults in the commune and asked, “Why don’t you stand up and do something?”) She joined several bands over the next few years, worked at a fish factory and a Coca-Cola bottling plant and finally met the friends who would become her ticket out of Iceland. On a summer day in 1986, she gave birth to her son, Sindri. That evening she formed the Sugarcubes.

It was a hobby, she says of the internationally successful edgy guitar band. They offered a refrain heard from a lot of good young bands: We can’t believe we’re making it. Apparently by accident, the Sugarcubes informed the world that Iceland, in fact, existed, and that it could produce a hit pop record. It could even do so while one of the singers tended to her young son. There were MTV videos and extensive tours.

When Björk left the band in 1992 — no major drama, it’s just that six years was enough — she got more deliberate. She left Iceland for London, and arty rock for techno and dance music. Her first solo album since childhood, “Debut,” came out in 1993 and went gold in the United States. She was 28.

The next album came out in 1995. It was called “Post,” supposedly because the songs are letters from London to Iceland. They combine techno with guitar with weird instruments (all elegantly, too: Play wine glasses on one of her albums and you won’t look foolish). Björk saves tiring genres from themselves by mixing them into others, then sews it all up with her macho bellowing and breathy lilting.

“Most bands try to imitate others,” “Ren & Stimpy” creator John Kricfalusi told Paper magazine. Kricfalusi directed her animated video for “I Miss You.” “But Björk is as original as Elvis — and she’s got a cuter groin thrust.”

She was suddenly everywhere, and was still trying to find the time to be as creative as usual. (Some Björk experts say she recorded the vocals for “Possibly Maybe,” off the “Post” album, nude, standing in water, in a cave in the Bahamas. As the story goes, an extra-long microphone cord was used. Bats from the cave, if you believe the story, can be heard swarming around her.) She was too good and too busy to not become a full-fledged celebrity, and it soon caught up with her.

It takes a lot of great songs to live down an assault on a journalist. Nobody’s quite forgotten Björk’s 1996 attack on a TV reporter at an airport in Thailand. It was a turning point that came at a turning point: More and more, the media wanted a piece of her, and when they couldn’t get enough, they turned, at least on this one day, to her 10-year-old son.

Björk had requested in advance that the press leave her and Sindri alone in Thailand until her press conference. When she arrived at the airport, she was surrounded by cameras. As Björk tried to get away, Julie Kaufman, a reporter from a cable TV station, approached Sindri and said, “Welcome to Bangkok!”

Björk lunged at Kaufman, dragging her to the floor and knocking her head against the concrete several times before security pulled her off. Later a mortified Björk apologized and Kaufman chose not to sue. The reporter allegedly turned down an offer to do an ad for a hairspray company — whose product was strong enough to withstand Björk’s fury. The singer’s reputation as an unbalanced brute was cemented.

The year got worse before it got better. A 24-year-old Miami fan, in love and enraged that Björk was then dating a black man, filmed himself building an acid bomb inside a hollowed-out book. The man, Ricardo Lopez, mailed the package to her London home, shaved, put a Björk song on the stereo and took his head off with a pistol. Police intercepted the bomb before it got to Björk’s home. Shocked, Björk took Sindri to Spain — after sending flowers and a card to the dead man’s parents.

She recuperated. There’s an aura of integrity at her center — think of a Space Age Bruce Springsteen in tights — that seems to let her actually work things out in her songs, the way nonfamous musicians have done for ages. And she’s smart, too. When “Homogenic” came out in 1997, it was shocking to hear someone so weird be so articulate. “I thought I could organize freedom,” she sings in “Hunter.” “How Scandinavian of me.”

If Björk is on the verge of something — if she’s permanently liminal — her music is too. It’s not too complicated to enjoy on the first listen, but sit down with a guitar to copy it and nothing really happens. Her songs are too odd to reproduce.

In one, it’s Broadway. In another, the bass rattles the floor under the speakers. In another, the guitar slips gently through an arpeggio like down a glacier, and meanwhile a decent dance beat keeps you moving. The whole thing happens behind a gentle old fuzz, like this futuristic music was actually recorded a hundred years ago.

There are references in her songs, and not the parlor-trick variety. She plays earnestly with crescendos, for example: If Led Zeppelin’s were sex — buildup, buildup, buildup, guitar solo! — hers are sex interrupted, or the walk home afterward. In the decadent, run-down old mansion of rock music, Björk has her head stuck way out the window, and appears to be planning either escape or renovation.

She’s been way out the window forever. Hear that bracing pause 25 years ago, halfway through her “Fool on the Hill” rendition, between verses, just before she belts out, “Oh oh oh!” Musically, the cover is fairly faithful to the original, but in this one moment she waits just a little longer than the Beatles did; it’s the most thoughtful, richest silence an 11-year-old has ever committed.

Lopez was on to something: People like her urgently. It’s the kind of haste that follows anyone too frenetic to keep up with. Luckily the haste is usually generous. Once she almost got an island.

“Björk has done more for the popularity of Iceland than most other Icelanders,” Icelandic Prime Minister David Oddsson told parliament last year. “My view is that she may be given the use of this island as a royalty payment, as recognition from the state.”

She’s mythic. People trip over themselves trying to elaborate the legend. Read a review from the last decade and you’ll almost certainly find her referred to as the Ice Queen, or the Elfin Princess, or the Elfin Witch, or the Icelandic Pixie, or the Icy Chanteuse, or the Iceland Elf.

Another thing that comes up is the occasional child in her. Or maybe it’s the occasional adult in her. It’s a compliment when it’s said, a way of explaining that she’s pure and unspoiled. But patronization aside, it’s imprecise. Imprecision is dangerous in the world of music, where too many stars are man-children and yet give us the opposite of this so-called kidlike purity.

Considerable effort has gone into pegging Björk, getting her number, and this is revealing. She’s slippery and we’re looking for a grip. We know she’s thoughtful, funky, glamorous and intractable, but we don’t have the proportions. Often we can’t seem to whistle the songs we love. Sometimes we can’t even picture her — she doesn’t look the same in any two photos. She’s the soap sliding around in the tub, the movie we never remember once we get to the video store.

“I don’t like in-between stuff,” she has said more than once, and she’s right. She’s on the border or she’s nothing at all. All brilliance is off the grid, but with Björk, the grid’s so far gone that she’s building a new one. It’s loud and passionate and sleek, the kind of grid that deserves an island.

That American reporter is, of course, me.

Though I am persona non grata with Hjartarson today, our relationship started on a friendly enough note nearly three years ago.

Near the end of my monthlong trip through Iceland, after seemingly visiting every major tourist attraction in the 110,000-population capital city, good fortune struck. On a street just off Laugevegur, the main drag of the old section of town, I spotted the Icelandic Phallological Museum. More good fortune: The curiously named museum, open just three hours a day, was open. The place was tiny (convenience store size) and the price was high (300 Icelandic krónur, or $4), but hell, I knew I’d never find a cheaper penis museum.

Inside, I was surrounded by more penises than at any point since high school gym classes. They were hanging on the walls, stuffed in jars, displayed with curatorial love — dried penises, penises embalmed in formaldehyde, massive penises displayed like hunting trophies. A tanned bull’s penis, a smoked horse’s penis. There were runty, shriveled penises of reindeer, foxes, minks and rats. There were seal and walrus penises with stiff penis bones — ensuring a perpetually erect state. There was the Big Penis — a 3-foot-long blue whale penis (which could have been an oar for a canoe). There was even a picture of an eagerly anticipated addition to the collection, the Homo sapiens penis. (Icelander Pall Arason, born in 1915, signed an official document willing his penis to the museum.)

Overseeing this vast collection of penises was an unassuming white guy, probably in his 50s, who told me he believed it to be the only collection of its kind in the world. I revealed my fascination and my reporter identity, and said that I would, perhaps, like to contact him in the future about a story. He smiled, and gave me a business card: “Sigurdur Hjartarson, Director.” He was happy to help.

I then purchased a few postcards of whale penises from his museum shop, I sent one to a friend with a guyish remark and that was it.

Until last spring. I had developed a terrible desire to return to Iceland for another summer trek. I started trolling around the Internet one day, just sentimentally keyword-searching for Icelandic things, when I remembered the penis collector.

A Web search soon revealed that the Icelandic Phallological Museum was not some kitschy, wax museum thing. Hjartarson, a schoolteacher and published author who wrote an Icelandic-to-Spanish textbook, was very serious about the science of phallology. He was expanding his collection. Two more humans had agreed to will their family jewels to Hjartarson. Foreign specimens, such as the phallic bone of an Ohio skunk and the testicles of a Danish red fox, were being added. Most significantly, though, after 25 years, Hjartarson was inching closer to his goal of collecting the penis of every mammalian species native to Iceland. (He had 40 of 42 penises.)

I started wondering: What possibly could have triggered his quest to collect every penis native to Iceland? And what would Hjartarson do once the 42nd Icelandic penis was obtained?

None of the pieces I read about the Phallological Museum sufficiently answered my questions. They were jokey news items, like a blurb from Philadelphia radio station Y100′s “bizarro” file. And there was a short, double-entendre-laced wire piece: “Members Only at Iceland Phallological Museum.” And Chuck Shepherd, of “News of the Weird,” supposed connoisseur of the eccentric, devoted a mere paragraph to Hjartarson, with the dismissive headline “Too Much Time on Their Hands.” None of the reporting on the penis museum answered my burning question: What did neighbors think when they saw the guy across the street lugging whale penises into his garage?

A void existed. A great story was still untold.

Last fall I e-mailed Hjartarson, proposing my story. I made it clear from the outset that this would be unlike earlier stories about him. This was not just about the museum — this was about him, how he developed his phallological interest, how others perceived his phallological interest. As a feature, this process would take some time, I explained. I would begin the interview with sets of e-mailed questions and then, if questions lingered, I would call him. I warned, in no uncertain terms, that “the number of questions, and the detail of the questions, may be greater than you’re accustomed to.”

When Hjartarson got back to me, he seemed enthused. He apologized for his tardy response, saying he had been very busy recently. He asked me to resend my questions, and he promised to answer promptly.

And he did. On Sunday, Oct. 29, I got Part 1 of his story:

The first penis. It was 1946 or 1947. Just after the end of the Great War, Hjartarson is working in the countryside in northern Iceland when a friend gives him four bull’s penises. Hjartarson dries the penises, and gives three of them to friends as Christmas gifts.

The idea. In 1974, nearly 30 years after that Christmas, he’s working as a headmaster at a secondary school. Some of his teachers worked at a whaling station during summer vacation. (This was, of course, before the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling.) These teachers started bringing him penises from the station. Then the idea for the museum was born. The museum would profile penises from all the mammal species in and around Iceland. And so the quest began.

Hjartarson also shed light on other aspects of the penis-collecting process. Domestic animals, such as sheep and horses, come from slaughterhouses. Seals and small whales are mostly caught in fishermen’s nets. As for the whale penises in his collection, many originally came from commercial whaling stations. But even after the 1986 ban, whale penis collecting continues. Each year, Hjartarson estimated, 12 to 16 whales get stranded in Iceland. And in Iceland, he wrote, when a whale gets stranded, it’s immediately on the television news. So when Hjartarson learns of a beached whale, he will travel to the spot to see if he can get the penis.

Wow. Hjartarson was a model source, giving me detailed answers to my questions. I was envisioning great things — a gripping narrative about the life of a penis chaser, like some Indiana Jones of penises. I wanted to re-create that moment when Hjartarson sits down to dinner, only to spot an Icelandic news reporter on the evening news, standing in front of a beached sperm whale. What happens? Does he jump into a battered Volvo and race through a blinding snowstorm to an isolated beach, where he emasculates the monster with an ax?

I was also dying to know what happened on Christmas Day 1946 or 1947 in northern Iceland. What were the expressions on the faces of Hjartarson’s friends as he unwrapped their gift … it could be cologne … it could be a tie … no — it’s a tanned bull’s penis.

Writing just days after he had obtained the well-preserved penis of a white-beaked dolphin (“the limb was whole, pelvic bones, and both testicles”), Hjartarson sounded like he was ready for more questions. He concluded his e-mail with an encouraging invite. A teachers strike was possible in Iceland and, after Nov. 7, “being a full-time teacher I may have plenty of time after that date.”

Great: I was in for unprecedented access. I seized the opportunity, firing off Round 2 of the interview with 10 more questions. Some were follow-ups — asking for more details (such as “tell me about Christmas Day 1946″). Others were of a more personal nature. (Remember, this was to be a profile.) I prefaced my personal questions with the assumption that some folks think penis collecting is unusual. I had, in fact, read that the government of Iceland rejected Hjartarson’s request for arts funding. I asked him about this. I asked him about what friends, neighbors and family members thought of his hobby. I wanted to hear about both “positive and negative” perceptions of penis collecting. I also revealed that whenever I told friends that I was writing a story about a penis collector, their instinctive reaction was “Is he gay?” I continued: “I’ve read, to the contrary, that you’re a heterosexual man, married with children. Is this true???”

That second message was not well received.

“Judging from your questions, you must be an American,” he wrote. Hjartarson was evidently suspicious of me. I had introduced myself (name, publication, background) in my initial e-mail. But now, strangely, he was asking for this same information again. He didn’t like some of my questions, and wouldn’t proceed until he “knew how the information would be used.”

OK. I wrote back immediately, hoping to allay any fears that I was some chump reporter looking for penis jokes. I listed publications (New York Times, Washington Post) that I had written for in the past. I told him about my Icelandic experience and referenced a friend in Iceland. I reiterated that this was a feature story, so the reporting was inherently more detailed than that for a regular news piece. And I even attempted to justify what I feared was my most controversial question, writing, “If I was writing a story about a woman who collected sex organs, I would ask about her sexual orientation, too.” Readers, I explained, will want to know.

There was no response from Iceland.

A few days later, I tried again, with a simple “just checking to see if you received my e-mail” message. A week passed with no response.

My third e-mail injected some urgency into the plea: “This is going to be a great story. I’d really love to wrap this up. So please …”

Nada.

Of course, by this point, I feared the worst. But I also considered other factors. Maybe he’s not receiving my messages. Maybe he’s mired in some teacher-strike negotiations. Maybe another white-beaked dolphin got caught in a net.

Enough speculation. It was time for us to talk.

On the morning of Dec 6, at 9:02 a.m. Central, 3:02 p.m., Reykjavík time, I called the world’s foremost penis collector.

After hearing my name and my attempted chumminess — “I’m the American reporter, just followin’ up” — Hjartarson stopped me. “I’m not answering your questions. I do not want to have anything to do with this anymore.”

Sensing the intense anger in his voice, sensing that there was little hope for persuading him to proceed, I said, “OK. Just answer this: Why? Why don’t you want to participate anymore?”

He responded, without pause: “You insulted me.”

Before I had a chance to say anything more, he hung up.

In my short journalism career, this was a first. There were people who wouldn’t — or couldn’t — answer my questions. There was once a woman in Queens who barked out answers to my questions, then told me to “get the hell out.” But never before had a source accused me of insulting him or her.

I contacted a friend in Iceland for counsel. Was the sexual-orientation question that big of a deal? Absolutely, he advised. Iceland, a country whose most famous citizen is avant-garde songstress Björk, is not the Bible Belt. In fact, on the global scale, it’s a sexually progressive place — Reykjavík has a lively gay scene. But Hjartarson is an oldster, in his late 50s, from rural northern Iceland, who worked as a cowboy in his youth. He may, my friend noted, have taken unkindly to a question about his sexual preference.

I felt bad. I remembered our first encounter and his friendly smile. I remembered those lighthearted cheery answers to my questions. (About his 85-year-old human penis donor, he joked: “He’s said to be active ‘both vertically and horizontally.’”)

I meditated briefly on Hjartarson’s perspective. There he was, a married father, a grandfather, working away, teaching classes by day, curing and drying the penises of Iceland in his free time. Enter my e-mail. He’s thinking, “No big deal. A few questions, a few answers, a few more visitors to my museum.” But this time, the reporter is a nosy, sex-obsessed American who has the gall to wonder if his pursuit of Icelandic penises means he’s a fag.

I sent off one final e-mail, an attempt at peace, a quest for closure. “What did I ask that you felt was insulting?”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

It’s late January, nearly two months after my last contact. There is still no word from Reykjavík.

I have accepted that I will not know what happened that Christmas in 1946 or 1947. I know that when I visit Iceland next, and when I inevitably visit the museum, I will not declare, “Hey, I’m that American reporter who e-mailed you.” (Instead, I will browse the penises incognito.)

But I do maintain my journalistic innocence. I was pleading my case to a friend last week, a former reporter and newspaper editor, who I think is fairly representative of conservative American attitudes. The friend, an obsessively ethical, righteous guy, initially scoffed and said, “You just don’t ask people about their sex life.”

I persisted. C’mon. Is it wildly inappropriate to ask a man who has spent much of the past 25 years chasing after — and collecting — penises about “perceptions of his sexual orientation”?

My friend softened. “Yeah, a guy who collects penises shouldn’t be homophobic.”

Although this excursion was billed as the “Women Born to Be Wild” tour, Laura had warned us of her fear of heights before we set off on this day’s 25-mile ride. She had been terrified two days before when we led our horses across a partially constructed bridge high above another roaring river.

“This is no time for self-analysis,” Judy warned. “Just don’t look down.”

As I listened to Judy try to calm Laura, I was suddenly 7 years old again in South Africa, riding a Lesotho pony on the edge of a mountain cliff. Encouraged by my mother to be fearless, I had survived and even savored that experience, but I understand the sudden, sweaty panic of vertigo.

Judy consoled and Laura persevered as we made our way slowly along the wet, foggy trail. After half an hour of heart-stopping riding, we emerged unscathed onto a flat spot of volcanic rock between mountain peaks. Relieved and elated, we dismounted from our horses, laughing and teasing each other about our “fear of falling” experience, and then took turns going for what Jamie dubbed “our Estee Lauder facials.”

From one of the many small steaming geysers boiling out of the mountain, we scooped up the sizzling gray clay and smoothed it over our chilled faces. We looked like women warriors undergoing some primitive initiation rite. “I’m sure you’ll look 17 when you wash yours off, ” quipped Anne, a thin, tough woman in her 50s.

“I’m just hoping they’ll have to ask for my ID before I get a beer,” replied Lisa, at 36 the youngest in the group.

Here I was: cold to the bone, faced smeared with clay, herding horses across a mountain range near the Arctic Circle — in a constant state of wonder. Call me “Incredulous in Iceland.” I had come to the “land of fire and ice” — so named for the wall-to-wall terrain of glaciers and active volcanoes — with “Adventure Women,” a Montana-based organization that arranges physically challenging trips worldwide for women over 30.

Our leader, Susan Eckert, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone, started “Adventure Women” on a shoestring 18 years ago after a divorce and the realization that a career in public health was not providing the risk and independence that she longed for. She found a sympathetic banker willing to lend her money for what others had told her was a ridiculous idea. She began by flying free as a courier to exotic international destinations, where she would then find local contacts to arrange her adventures. Today, “Adventure Women” excursions include whitewater rafting in Patagonia, treks through the Himalayas and anthropological desert explorations in New Mexico.

Exactly what was I doing here? For one thing, I needed a break from my emotionally demanding job as a social worker in a low-cost health clinic. The confines of my office job also left me in dire need of a serious physical challenge. And in recent years, as my children grew older, our planned family vacations had given way to more spur-of-the-moment traveling arrangements. This trip would fit well with our evolving family situation.

Two years ago I’d been on another adventure, a riding trip to the Australian rainforest with my 14-year-old daughter, Caitlin. Now, at 16, she was rehearsing a play in San Francisco and socially booked up. My son was working two jobs between his freshman and sophomore years in college, and my husband was making another documentary. Besides, the only horse he ever rode was on the back lot of a Hollywood studio.

So I took the plunge, feeling a little guilty at this self-indulgence and wondering if I’d spend the time away from my family worrying about them. I signed up for Iceland, despite my son’s mock warnings that I might find myself “on an island with a lot of dykes.”

Before setting off on the seven-day ride across 140 miles of lava fields, rocky terrain, mountain paths and alpine meadows, our group spent the first night in a hotel in Reykjavik, Iceland’s brightly-painted capital, where the majority of its 270,000 residents live. As we introduced ourselves, I was startled to discover that Judy and I were the only two in this group of middle-aged women who had children. “The umbilical cord to your child gets longer and longer as they grow up,” Judy acknowledged later, when talking about her 12-year-old son. “I’m ready for this.”

Most of the rest of the group were single or divorced, career women who worked hard and were looking for some action. Jamie, a 44-year-old accountant, boasted, “I make good money and can afford a great trip. I travel for work, stay in fancy hotels. I don’t need that on a vacation. I want an adventure, something unique.” This was her sixth “Adventure Women” trip — she had already sailed in Greece and trekked across Uganda to see gorillas. Jamie was hooked.

Lisa, the youngest, was a federal law enforcement officer, tough and capable. But others were here to gain confidence. Erica, 39, an engineer at Kodak, had learned to ride (just well enough) for the sole purpose of being able to come on this trip. She hoped to make friends but confessed, “I don’t mix that much and don’t really mind being in the background.”

In addition to our group leader, Susan, there was another Susan in our group — a woman who was timid but determined to complete the trip despite a nagging cough and cold. A financial analyst from California, she ended up keeping to herself much of the time and appeared at times annoyed by the exuberance of the group. Laura, who does marketing for a drug company, gave us each a pat on the back for being there. “All of us are independent, intelligent and confident enough to come on this trip by ourselves,” she said. But the physical demands would test her limits as well.

The only two trip members who already knew each other were Anne and Judy. Both had lived in Ann Arbor, Mich., before Anne moved to North Carolina with her husband, a retired veterinarian, to run a horse farm. Anne and I were the most experienced riders, but she was more horse-obsessed. “When my husband and I were dating,” she told me, “we would go watch mares being artificially inseminated.”

Although this was a “women’s adventure,” our Icelandic guides were a couple in their 30s: Sigga and her husband, Binni, the parents of three children. We were also accompanied by Binni’s friend, whose Icelandic name was so difficult for us to pronounce that we simply called him “Cowboy,” a nickname he relished. Cowboy chewed tobacco in the Marlboro Man tradition, but in reality he was a fisherman and writer, and frequently fell off his horse. Binni preferred to snort his tobacco — in keeping with the smoke-free policy established by our group — and he and Sigga were seasoned riders.

“Ya-Ya!” Binni would shout out each morning, the command for our group of American women to get onto our grubby, tough Icelandic horses who were picked out of a herd of 40 for each day’s ride. Part of the thrill of the trip was riding with a herd of rambunctious horses. “Front riders” would lead, keeping the herd behind them, while the “back riders” made sure no horses strayed, especially the two black-and-white mares we tagged the “Twisted Sisters.”

Off we’d go at a steady trot or “tolt,” a comfortable gait that is unique to the spirited breed of Icelandic horses. We’d ride for three hours or so before we’d stop to have lunch and get new horses. Most days we ate squashed sandwiches kept in the saddle bag, except when our support vehicle — a four-wheel-drive commanded by a solemn chain-smoker named Eiter — would meet us and we’d have the luxury of a hot drink and a couple of cookies.

On the third day, we had lunch in a downpour. Cowboy suddenly raised his hands to the sky and implored Thor, the Viking god, to stop the rain. (Iceland is reputed to have a large population of ghosts, trolls and elves, which fits in a land with long periods of winter darkness and a landscape of weird rock and lava formations.) Cowboy convinced us to take part in a pagan dance, the likes of which I will never duplicate unless one day I find myself again shivering in the middle of a volcanic field. Apparently we appeased Thor, and the rain stopped. Then we set off again across miles of black ash toward our evening’s destination, a hut in the mountains.

We’d been warned that this exotic adventure included some “discomfort,” and indeed the mountain huts were quite Spartan. Anne tried to shower that night, only to find herself enveloped in freezing water. We comforted her with the reminder that we’d be soaking in the hot spring the next day. At some huts, there was no electricity, which might seem irrelevant in a country where the sun barely sets in the summer. But mountain clouds darkened the long twilight, and by dinner, we had to light candles to see. Some nights after dinner, Binni brought out a plastic tub and roped us into helping wash dishes, tossing soapy plates into the air for one of us to catch and dry. Then we settled in for the evening, fortified by the brandy and cognac we’d each had the foresight to buy at the airport’s duty-free store.

To entertain us, Binni recited popular ghost stories and tales of rapacious Nordic gods, including an epic poem about an “afturganga” — an unfulfilled lover-turned-zombie who carried his victims off to hell:

The moon hides, as death rides,

Do you not see the white mark

On my brow, Garun, Garun.

Fortunately, Icelandic folklore also includes more attractive otherwordly creatures such as the handsome elves, whom my guidebook described as “conscientious and kind lovers.”

Stimulated by these accounts, Jamie, the most outspoken woman in the group, started up what was to become a nightly ghost theme at bedtime: “Will the ghosts come tonight? We’ll take them only if they’re straight, single and employed. Or with an inheritance. And they should be the kind who take showers. Straight ghosts, come. Come! We’ll leave the door open.”

The lusty supplications ricocheted around the crowded hut as we wiggled into the sleeping bags supplied to us. “Wow, these liners are so tight,” a voice in the dark complained. “No room to spread your legs, ladies.”

Though it had been decades since some of us shared dormitory rooms, most of the women enjoyed the camaraderie of our intimate living quarters. Others, such as Susan, who told us she had come “to break down my fear of being in groups,” had a harder time with it. You had to be able to get used to group snoring and stumbling over bodies if you needed to venture outside during the pitch-dark nights.

The male guides for the group were funny and helpful, but they occasionally got in the way of our unfettered, newfound independence. When we needed to pee, for instance. Since we drank a fair amount of tea or coffee at breakfast, we began strategizing a few hours into each morning ride about the most appropriate place to pee out of view of the men. That was not always easy on flat, treeless lava beds.

Once, while Binni and Cowboy were holding back the herd, which had been agitated by a feisty palomino, our group went ahead across a bridge and took the opportunity to strip off our layers of garments and enjoy peeing without having to hide. It turned out to be a surprisingly blissful experience: As I looked at the herd moving toward us against a beautifully stark landscape that stretched to the horizon, I felt exhilarated and free.

Leaving the mountain wind and sideswiping rain for the blue skies and dazzling light of a green valley inspired me to ask to ride the unpredictable horse whose name roughly translates “Indian.” A few days before, I had been on Indian when he bolted out of Swan Lake, where Cowboy and Sigga had been swimming on their horses in frigid water. Indian was young, powerful and had a tolt to die for.

I maneuvered him down a twisting mountain path and was approaching a steep slope to the valley when Binni pointed out the “erotic peak” straight ahead. “We call it ‘penis erectus,’” he informed us. As I considered the accuracy of his description of the jutting rock, several of the more rebellious horses, led by the Twisted Sisters, slipped past us and made a getaway. Binni and our irrepressible border collie gave chase, snapping at their heels.

The sudden commotion inspired Indian, who was on a loose rein, to take off at full gallop toward the valley. By instinct, I tightened the rein, still holding my daughter’s cashmere hat, which was on “permanent loan” to her from a friend and which I was determined to bring home. I pulled hard on the reins to stop him. When that failed, I tried jabbing his bit, softening and then hardening the pull. But he had his head in the air and was on a helter-skelter flight down the rocky slope.

Dimly, I heard various voices — Binni’s, Anne’s — shouting indecipherable instructions from behind me. I had visions of myself hurtling over Indian’s head onto a rock and the ensuing disgrace of it all. Determined to stop my crazed horse, I pulled to make him turn. He complied by tilting his head in the direction of my pull, eyes upturned, but his body and soul still roared straight down. In a flash, I recalled Susan describing a woman on a previous Icelandic excursion who had a bad fall and had to cut short her vacation. I was not going to let that happen.

With all my might, I jolted my horse back to his senses with a sharp right turn that forced him to an abrupt stop. I was thrilled to still be clutching the cashmere hat. With immense relief, I returned to the safe haven behind the herd. Several women did take spills during our trip, none of them serious. But I know that if I had fallen that time, it would have been bad. That evening, as I lay in a meadow with Binni, Cowboy and Anne and analyzed what had gone wrong, I appreciated every intact bone in my body.

On our last day, Laura decided to ride four-wheel-drive rather than a horse. “This horse, it’s like one of those thigh machines in the gym,” she had complained. “He’s so broad, I think I’d never be able to have children. Not that I’d ever want to.” Jamie had likewise informed us the “mother thing” was not for her: “If I’d had kids they’d all be mass murderers,” she insisted. “My family was so dysfunctional — and you know how that stuff goes down for generations.”

We ended our trip at Binni and Sigga’s farm at the base of a verdant mountain where several slender waterfalls descended. As I watched the border collie recognize his destination and dart up the road toward their red-roofed farmhouse, I found that I had come to feel very much at home in this strange land.

That night, Binni offered moonshine to his American guests and I suspected the start of some legendary Icelandic revelry. Alas, I fell asleep, exhausted. It wasn’t until about four in the morning, when I heard Anne and Judy giggling and stumbling into bed, that I realized I’d missed the carousing. Apparently the night involved a visit to a nearby farm and skinny dipping with our guides. But this came at a price. Staring at a bubbling geyser on the bus back to Reykjavik, Anne moaned, “That’s how my stomach feels.”

On our last night in Reykjavik, we had a farewell dinner, where the more reckless among us supped on Icelandic delicacies such as putrefied shark washed down with cognac. But to my dismay, this band of intrepid women who had braved mountain gorges and ghostly nights spent their final hours in Iceland doing what I have strenuously avoided most of my life: shopping. I guess even “adventure women” have their weaknesses.

At the airport, Susan began to entice me with tales of upcoming trips to Italy, Timbuktu, Yellowstone and the Amazon. I would have been completely entranced except for the fact that the Icelandic baggage handler managed to get the lock on Susan’s bag caught in the zipper of his fly. My last image of Iceland is of a man struggling with the real-life shame, if not the agony, immortalized in “There’s Something About Mary.” Susan had to wrestle with his zipper and her combination lock for quite a while — so long, in fact, that the airline gave our seats away to other passengers. In the end, we were forced to fly first-class. Adventure is a many-splendored thing.

Back home, I returned to an avalanche of e-mail from the group, all of whom were suffering post-vacation blues as they returned to their office cubicles. But all of them seemed quite content with what they had done. As for me, this was the first time in my life away from my son and daughter that I did not worry about them — at least during the day, when I was totally engaged in my adventure. At night sometimes, my anxieties surfaced in dreams of various calamities — raves gone bad, car crashes, unplanned pregnancies. But I had also discovered that I could escape these fears, knowing that my kids are quite self-sufficient, reasonably responsible teenagers with a father who is only occasionally neglectful. I could get used to this.

Besides, we heard they had a flea market on weekends and we got terribly excited about the possibilities of buying old Icelandic rummage: floorlamps shaped like the Norse goddess Freya with whale oil spilling out of her breasts, carved out of petrified manatee, or coffee tables made of Lucite with the smiling corpse of an ice troll preserved inside. We would return from our shopping expedition laden with exotic objects we could sell for thousands of dollars back on the streets of New York.

At JFK Airport we were surrounded by all of these Sammy Hagar Icelandic people with huge, boxy, square heads. Think of Viking sculpture and you think of big, square blocks of wood hacked with hatchets and sharp rocks to represent big chins and triangular noses, with fearsome dents for eyes. It turns out that this wasn’t naive, interpretive folk art but actually a fairly photo-perfect account of what these people actually look like. The widest heads I’d ever seen. The hand span of a nine-year-old child between each eye. Jutting brows, jutting chins, extremities jutting out all over. Aryan totem pole people with rock-’n'-roll perms.

Iceland Air wasn’t exactly the Concorde. We were intimidated by the Nazi-experiment stewardesses with big blue plastic eyes and fangs — a battalion of stainless steel Heather Locklears with permanent migraines. They looked like they’d smile the same tensely stretched, diamond-tooth, saw-blade smile if they gave you a bottle of cognac and a pillow or if they disemboweled you with the jagged edge of a broken tea cup. We ordered the “vegetarian menu,” which consisted of some pucks of fibrous beige matter and a soft, tube-shaped mound of something we thought was soy cheese but turned out to be vegetarian waterproofing sealant. The seating arrangements in tourist class had a roominess reminiscent of the Middle Passage. Some suffocated quietly, others lost the use of their limbs. We drank “Viking” beer. We did not watch “Jumanji.”

At the Reykjavik airport, we were greeted by big posters: ICELAND — THE SOURCE OF QUALITY. Outside were children in bathing suits, their bare feet prancing in the snow. Colorful bird relatives of the Great Auk. Wool.

Iceland is made of volcanos and glaciers. It looks like the surface of the moon, if the moon had been left out of the refrigerator for too long and was starting to fester. Iceland, chew-toy of Thor’s dog, whose toothmarks pock the landscape alongside the jagged, volcanic crevasses that form the cold vulvas of old mother despair. Not a vacation spot. A forbidding tundra suitable only for mammoth and the brave, ruddy Inuit.

You realize after a few minutes that the pride of Iceland is its sheep, which they dissect in innumerable ways to make sweaters and hats and mittens and mutton and all manner of dumb things made of wool, like torturous underwear that nobody could wear except Christian martyrs. Food is limited. Apart from mutton, there is smoked fish and this substance known as “skyr” which is a thick white yogurt paste they are trying to make exciting with the use of racy advertising fonts. But in Reykjavik, you actually get a choice of cuisines. You have the choice of Chinese, or Italian. For music, you have the choice of Bj&oumlrk, or Bj&oumlrk.

We were horribly excited to go to the flea market. We got up hours early and left the Hotel SAGA, which was sort of like a Hyatt Regency you’d find in pre-Lech Walesa Poland. Vast empty banquet halls with people sitting at huge round tables, huddled together against the emptiness, taking turns at the mutton and smoked fish buffet. They were out of skyr.

The flea market took place in a big empty building like a gutted gymnasium. It was a grievous and tearful disappointment. Old Avon cosmetics. Malcolm X T-shirts. Terrycloth hair ties. Thin, cheap brown and gray leather jackets with elastic waistbands and space-age padded shoulders that only Eastern European plumber guys wear. Vinyl and orthopedic nurse shoes. Everything covered by a thin layer of volcanic dust from lovelessness and neglect. I bought some terrycloth hair ties and some plastic bull heads that you stick in the top of open wine bottles, so that it looks like the bull is bleeding or vomiting wine from its mouth. Then we left, basically heartbroken and empty-handed.

The National Museum of Iceland was the most pathetic thing of all. When you’re a kid it’s perfectly fine to tape bugs and garbage and comic books to the wall and call it a museum, but when you are an ancient culture which just doesn’t have much to offer, it’s probably best not to even attempt it. In the guidebooks, the big excuse was, “Well, they were just so cold and hungry they didn’t really have the strength or time or materials to do art, so here’s this old spoon, and a chair, and a doorknob.” There was also a retarded-looking fourth grade drawing of a guy in a big, black hat drinking watered curd and eating “sliced pickled ram’s testicles, a local delicacy.” And that was basically it, all contained in a building the size of a grade-school library. Mmmmm. Gelatinous discs of testicle. Source of Quality.

The best part of Iceland was a geothermal seawater lagoon in the middle of nowhere. Imagine wind whipping around your head pushing globes of rising steam, and looking up at a cold, white sky and leaning back in this warm, warm
water, with veins of super hot water running through it. The warm water fills up your ears and you hear nothing but the rubbery blowing of the wind hitting the surface of the water, and the water is white from the white silica mud and the sky is white and you’re floating on your back looking up and all the white blends together and isn’t separate, and you’re in a wholly different dimension, floating, floating, with nothing in your head but the smell of sulfur. It made the whole deal worth it.