Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness

She stopped the car and we walked alongside running water in the world and watched mallards swimming in pools under the banks. There, too, swam the ever-bowing northern phalaropes (phalaropus hyperboreus). We sat on a moss-grown promontory with a bird-knoll on top, and we looked at a herd of horses in a hollow; the horses had started carrying their heads high after the ordeal of winter, biting one another, kicking up their heels, squealing, wrinkling their noses, mating. Newly marked lambs were still bloody about the head, some unlicked and only just born, others not born at all. Seldom had the sun been as bright all spring as today, but towards evening a gold-coloured fog was born far out to sea.

We came to a café that was some kind of modern heaven on earth, a compound of plastic, shellac, oil paint, turpentine, and glass but suffering from a lack of the smell of food and people. Here there was no sustenance to be had except boiled sweets. For thirst one could get carbon water, which is also out of this world, and we drank this from an unspeaking waitress. We sat side by side at a wafer-thin plastic table that stood on spindly iron legs in this shiny turpentine heaven outside existence. The woman looked from far within herself at her companion, caught his head now and again and placed it under her cheek, sighing and whispering that tonight we would go together to the end of the world; then put the head back where it belonged. But when we came out, the golden haze that a while ago had looked like a cold theatrical fire away on the horizon had reached land; a black cloud obscured the sun.