INGVELLIR NATIONAL PARK, Iceland -- On a damp and sullen day, in the drama of the rocky rift separating east and west tectonic plates, you can almost hear the horde of Vikings gathered at one of the world's oldest parliaments.

Given the political contentiousness of its offspring American Congress, it seems little surprise that this original Icelandic legislature temporarily lost its law-making power after only 340 years. (For the next 500 years, its role was judicial, and for nearly 50 years, it was disbanded.)

The surprise is that it happened here at all. Shouldn't the oldest continuous democratic assembly, as some have called it, hail from Rome or Britain or France? Yet many bestow that honor on the fierce Vikings who gathered in 930 near a confluence of crossroads, rocky fissures and a fish-filled lake (and meet still in more civilized quarters in Reykjavik.)

In Iceland, the unexpected is commonplace.

Start with the name -- a misnomer if ever there was one. You often hear the quip that Iceland got the wrong end of the Viking marketing scheme: While this island-by-the-Gulfstream is temperate and grassy (even in winter, temperatures in the capital generally rise above freezing), more northerly Greenland is buried in ice (fast-melting though it is in these warming times).

In summer, Iceland becomes a field of flowers, and for three July days I will bask in the sun spilling over Reykjavik's cafés, motor beneath grassy mountain ridges gushing with waterfalls, slip into natural thermal pools and canter across seaside farm fields on pint-size ponies with a gait smooth as a hobby horse.

FIRE AND ICE

The name isn't all wrong, I soon discover, for Iceland is a land of fire and ice.

The country's 200 volcanoes are the boils of irritation opening along the tectonic rub called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and more than a third of the earth's lava flow in the past 500 years has happened here, according to experts at San Francisco's Exploratorium.

For casual travelers, the easiest access to Iceland's geological extremes is at Reykjavik's Volcano Show, where two back-to-back films are shown in a tiny theater by host, filmmaker and ticket-seller Villi Knudsen. Glacial ice is split by volcanic explosions before your eyes as searing magma and meters-thick ice collide in violent clashes that reshape the island, forming lakes and floods often hidden beneath the ice. The most startling footage is of the 1960s eruptions off the coast that resulted in the creation of a new island, Surtsey -- mirroring the ancient creation of Iceland itself.

Step outside the theater, and for the moment at least the geology lesson seems academic. Reykjavik is a chic urban village anchored by the concrete pyramid of Hallsgrmskirkja church and surrounded by commercial sprawl. The cozy streets are lined with boutiques, coffee houses and stylish bars burning with the sharp intensity of summer love. Skateboarders zip into the town's central plaza. Cyclists and joggers pound the harborside path in the unending light of summer. The thin grass glows emerald in the fleeting warmth.

But once you've hit the local museums and nightclubs and experienced the whopping prices ($150 per day car rental, $100 for tandoori chicken and a couple of beers), you'll be drawn back to the elements.

Nearly everyone who visits Iceland goes to the Blue Lagoon, the thermal pool complex near the airport. It's part tourist trap, part transcendent voyage into an ethereal universe. Steam rises from the pool, carved from a lava landscape that looks like it should be on the moon.

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