Beneath our feet are luxurious moss and lichen, intensely patterned and complex. ‘No midges,’ lists Oliver, of the benefits of autumn. ‘And no mosquitoes. I thought it would be summer forever. The light… ’ The bronzed sinews of his wrists say that just a few weeks ago was T-shirt weather for a very short while. The Arctic receives the same amount of sunlight as the tropics, only it comes all at once. From June to mid July is the midnight sun in Eqi – light 24 hours a day. Further north the polar night, with its constant darkness and -40″C, lasts several months in the winter, but a more bearable eight weeks here.
For hours Oliver and I marvel at the variety of what we find. All around grow tiny ancient willow trees twisted and flattened onto the rocks and candy-sweet miniature harebells more purple than anything I’ve seen. Chewing on alpine bistort, we pull the fine, bleached fronds moreishly through our teeth, crunching the tiny seeds. And then for a long time in silence, we lie on our stomachs on the mossy green softness, rifling with greedy hands through tiny hedges of crowberries – the size of a peppercorn and busting intense acidic deliciousness – gobbling 20 to every one we drop in a bag for the others until our gums are black Rose-warm clouds dull into evening by a moon hanging like a dog-rose. Beyond the rocks, the glimmer of a white fox. When the sky finally starts its proper decline into a bruised aubergine – the endless night – is it unbearably strange? I ask Oliver, but he just shrugs.
There is an Innuit word specifically for this feeling. Perleromeq, meaning The burden’, but people mostly scoff when I mention it, the Greenlandic teenagers in Illulisat assuring me that the sun is ‘boring’ and only gets in the way of their much-coveted, 10-hour-long, horror-movie marathons They make it obvious that they think Europeans fuss too much. So much talk, they chide me laughingly, so much noise! Even the Greenlandic language doesn’t hold with drama. Numbers in Innuit only go up to 12. After that, it’s just a pragmatic and untheatrical ‘many’. And yet… everybody seems happy to tell stories about the Qivitoq: humans banished for one reason or another into the wilderness, where out of the general complexities of human passion and desperation they have learned to shape-shift.
It must be impassible to not be superstitious in such a landscape, I think, picking my way down through the trackless dark to my hut on the last night in Eqi, stumbling over roots and stone, eventually prising off my boots and lying under a pile of coats listening to the continual groan and creak of the glacier, turning over, endlessly, memories of conversations and images of things I’ve read. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen crossing the Greenland interior in 1888 wearing just ‘a jacket lined with squirrel skin’. The wild, autumnal skies – badger-grey, with teeming daubs of indigo. Fari leaving the frozen mariner in his ice-grave and taking his sled elsewhere, nothing on his mind but seal and the breath of his dogs and the undulating dark. Nikolena, telling me that she once saw a ragged old man ‘with long hair and burning eyes’ standing among stampeding reindeer, when he suddenly leapt, but in the form of an Arctic hare.
Back in Ilulissat briefly a few days later, I try to go to a screening of Mission Impossible in the sports hall but the projectionist is sleeping off a heavy night, and instead a large group of eight-year-old Greenlandic girls dance to folk music wearing scuffed and mended tap shoes, passing around the one compliant brother while his mother rocks with pride and amusement.
Obedient on benches, the youngest children sit neat as cherubim, muffled in sweet woollen suits that look freshly unfolded after a season packed away. It’s radiator-hot in the hall, and after long days in fresh Eqi I feel blasted and woozy, eyes choked and brain smeared, dozing for a while in a chair.
Walking the twilight streets later, sleds are being oiled and new puppies counted among the silvery froth of late-blooming Arctic cottongrass. Larger icebergs have started gathering in the bay, some coloured blue as a powerful detergent. And I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget the feeling of being a slack-jawed traveller into the unknown, when one creation silently inched its way past the shore looking like a fairy palace built of sapphires, while behind me 6,000 dogs wailed. Winter is coming.
