East of Desolation

I’d managed a nice bright reply, but she was hitting a bit too close for comfort and I think she knew it. For a little while I busied myself unnecessarily with a chart on my knee checking our course.

About five minutes later we came down through cloud and she gave a sudden exclamation. ‘Look over there.’

A quarter of a mile away half a dozen three-masted schooners played follow-my-leader, sails full, a sight so lovely that it never failed to catch at the back of my throat.

‘Portuguese,’ I said. ‘They’ve been crossing the Atlantic since before Columbus. After fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in May and June they come up here to complete their catch. They still fish for dories with handlines.’

‘It’s like something out of another age,’ she said, and there was genuine wonder in her voice.

Any further conversation was prevented by one of those sudden and startling changes in the weather for which the Greenland coast, even in summer, is so notorious. One moment a cloudless sky and crystal clear visibility and then, with astonishing rapidity, a cold front swept in from the ice-cap in a curtain of stinging rain and heavy mist.

It moved towards us in a grey wall and I eased back on the throttle and took the Otto down fast.

‘Is it as bad as it looks?’ Ilana Eytan asked calmly.

‘It isn’t good if that’s what you mean.’

I didn’t need to look at my chart. In this kind of flying anything can happen and usually does. You only survive by knowing your boltholes and I ran for mine as fast as I could.

We skimmed the shoulder of a mountain and plunged into the fjord beyond as the first grey strands of mist curled along the tips of the wings. A final burst of power to level out in the descent and we dropped into the calm water with a splash. Mist closed in around us and I opened the side window and peered out as we taxied forward.

The tip of an old stone pier suddenly pushed out of the mist and I brought the Otter round, keeping well over to the right. A few moments later we saw the other end of the pier and the shore and I dropped the wheels beneath the floats and taxied up on to a narrow shingle beach. I turned off the mast switch and silence enveloped us.

‘Where are we?’ she asked.

‘A disused whaling station – Argamash. Like to take a look round?’

‘Why not. How long will we be here?’

‘Depends on the weather. One hour – two at the most. It’ll disappear as unexpectedly as it came.’

When I opened the door and jumped down she followed me so quickly that I didn’t get the chance to offer her a hand down. It was colder than Frederiksborg, but still surprisingly mild considering we were twenty miles inside the Arctic Circle and she looked about her with obvious interest.

‘Can we explore?’

‘If you like.’

We followed the beach and scrambled up an old concrete slipway that brought us to the shore-end of the pier. The mountain lifted above us shrouded in mist and the broken shell of the old whale-oil processing factory and the ruins of forty or fifty cottages crouched together at its foot.

It started to rain slightly as we walked along what had once been the main street and she pushed her hands into her pockets and laughed, a strange excitement in her voice.

‘Now this I like – always have done since I was a kid. Walking in the rain with the mist closing in.’

‘And keeping out the world,’ I said. ‘I know the feeling.’

She turned and looked at me in some surprise, then laughed suddenly, but this time it lacked its usual harsh edge. She had changed. It was difficult to decide exactly how – just a general softening up, I suppose, but for the moment at any rate, she had become a different person.

‘Welcome to the club. You said this was once a whaling station?’

I nodded. ‘Abandoned towards the end of the last century.’

‘What happened?’

‘They simply ran out of whale in commercial quantities.’ I shrugged. ‘Most years there were four or five hundred ships up here. They over-fished, that was the trouble, just like the buffalo – hunted to extinction.’

There was a small ruined church at the end of the street, a cemetery behind it enclosed by a broken wall and we went inside and paused at the first lichen covered headstone.

‘Angus McClaren – died 1830,’ she said aloud. ‘A Scot.’

I nodded. ‘That was a bad year in whaling history. The pack ice didn’t break up as early as usual and nineteen British whalers were caught in it out there. They say there were more than a thousand men on the ice at one time.’

She moved on reading the half-obliterated names aloud as she passed slowly among the graves. She paused at one stone, a slight frown on her face, then dropped to one knee and rubbed the green moss away with a gloved hand.

A Star of David appeared, carved with the same loving care that had distinguished the ornate Celtic crosses on the other stones and like them, the inscription was in English.

‘Aaron Isaacs,’ she said as if to herself, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘Bosun – SeaQueen out of Liverpool. Killed by a whale at sea – 27th July, 1863.’

She knelt there staring at the inscription, a hand on the stone itself, sadness on her face and finding me standing over her, rose to her feet looking strangely embarrassed for a girl who normally seemed so cast-iron, and for the first time I wondered just how deep that surface toughness went.

She heaved herself up on top of a square stone tomb and sat on the edge, legs dangling. ‘I forgot my cigarettes. Can you oblige?’

I produced my old silver cigarette case and passed it up. She helped herself and paused before returning it, a slight frown on her face as she examined the lid.

‘What’s the crest?’

‘Fleet Air Arm.’

‘Is that where you learned to fly?’ I nodded and she shook her head. ‘The worst bit of casting I’ve seen in years. You’re no more a bush pilot than my Uncle Max.’

‘Should I be flattered or otherwise?’

‘Depends how you look at it. He’s something in the City – a partner in one of the merchant banking houses I think. Some kind of finance anyway.’

I smiled. ‘We don’t all look like Humphrey Bogart you know or Jack Desforge for that matter.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it the hard way. Why Greenland? There must be other places.’

‘Simple – I can earn twice as much here in the four months of the summer season as I could in twelve months anywhere else.’

‘And that’s important?’

‘It is to me. I want to buy another couple of planes.’

‘That sounds ambitious for a start. To what end?’

‘If I could start my own outfit in Newfoundland and Labrador I’d be a rich man inside five or six years.’

‘You sound pretty certain about that.’