1

      I brought the plane in low over the sea and took her up to three thousand as land appeared and beyond, through the harsh white moonlight, the Greenland ice-cap gleamed like a string of pearls.

      East from Cape Desolation the Julianehaab Bight was full of smoky mist indicating no wind to speak of and certainly nothing more than five knots, which was something. At least it gave me a chance of dropping into the valley at the head of the fjord. Not much of a one, but better than staying here.

      It was cold in the cabin with the night wind streaming in through the splintered windscreen and the lighted dials on the instrument panel were confusing in their multiplicity, occasionally merging together in a meaningless blur.

      And then, on the far side of the mist the waters of the fjord gleamed silvery white in the intense light and the strange twisted moonscape rolled towards the ice-cap, every feature etched razor-sharp.

      It was time to go. I reduced speed, put the auto pilot in control and unbuckled my safety belt. When I turned, he was there as he always was, the head disembodied in the light from the instrument panel, eyes fixed, staring into eternity as he lolled back in the co-pilot’s seat.

      I moved into the darkness of the cabin and stumbled, falling to one knee, my outstretched hand touching the cold, ice-hard face of the other, and panic seized me as it always did and it was as if I couldn’t breathe as I lurched through the darkness and clawed at the quick release handles on the exit hatch.

      It fell away into the night and I stepped into space without hesitation, aware of the intense cold, feeling strangely free. I seemed to somersault in slow motion and for a single moment saw the plane above me in the night drifting steadily eastwards like some dark ghost and then I reached for the ring to open my chute and it wasn’t there and I gave one single despairing cry that was swept away into the night as I plunged into darkness.

      I usually only got the dream when I was overtired or depressed, but it always left me in the same state – soaked in sweat and shaking like a leaf. I lay there looking up at the ceiling for a while, then flung aside the bedclothes and padded across to the window. When I rubbed the condensation away a fine morning greeted me.

      I was flying out of Frederiksborg that year, Godthaab the capital having got just a little too civilised for comfort. It was a small place about two hundred miles below the Arctic Circle on the south-west coast. The population couldn’t have been more than fifteen hundred, but during the short summer season it was artificially inflated by the influx of two or three hundred construction workers from Denmark who were engaged in building rather ugly three-storied blocks of concrete flats as part of the government development programme.

      But Frederiksborg, like most places on the Greenland coast, still had the look of a raw pioneering town, the mushroom growth of some gold or silver strike. The roads were unsurfaced and most of the town was scattered over a peninsula