It’s eight in the morning and pitch dark as we climb into the Iceland coastguard helicopter. This far north, it won’t be light for hours.
The darkness may make the pilots’ jobs harder – relying on night vision helmets to navigate – but it helps the rest of us.
For as we approach the site of the eruption, all we can make out is faint orange smudges of light.
The eruption has died down quicker than many expected
Just 72 hours ago we would have been flying over a two-mile-long curtain of fire: Lava being forced 40-50 metres into the air by a vast chamber of magma less than a kilometre below the surface.
Only a few hours before we took off, webcams showed a few cones of lava were still sputtering away in the darkness.
But it’s now like looking into the embers of a dying fire.
We come in for a precarious landing on a hilltop next to the lava field, guided by a spotlight to search for even ground.