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the window to see if the scheduled flight to Hammerfest looks entirely normal. A quick scan establishes the plane looks real enough, though the door isn’t completely closed. Outside only the lights of the tiny airport building are lit. It is 6.15am. We have no competition for our slot on the single runway, set within the deep snow like a dark exclamation mark. So why aren’t we moving? The cockpit door slides back and the pilot extracts himself with difficulty, opens the side door, bending to avoid hitting his head and steps carefully onto one of the wings. He bounces on the pliant fuselage a couple of times before swinging back through the door and into his faded blue leather seat. Smiling cheerfully at the stewardess he strains to read a thermometer gauge. A few more words are exchanged and the cycle of powering up and decelerating resumes. I look round. Everyone else is still asleep. Suddenly, I realise the plane is de-icing. Snow on the wings is a small matter on the ground, but at 20,000 feet and temperatures of minus 30, light fluffy stuff becomes heavy and solid very fast. I smile at having unravelled this little mystery and feel somehow initiated. Fully 15 minutes after the first engine surge, the plane finally taxies into position and without further fuss lifts cleanly into the clear March sky. An Arctic Dawn. I turn the words over slowly in my mind and conjure up images of high-flying sea eagles, low-flying Amelia Earharts and icebound Arctic explorers. All somehow at home in this epic, glowing terrain where jagged mountains turn into hard, squat lumps beneath us as the plane soars into the low, horizontal rays of the rising sun. I look down to see myth meet landscape. Here is the very route taken by the loving, resilient and faithful Gerda in the tale of the Snow Queen – travelling sometimes on the back of a reindeer, pounding hooves over narrow fringes of beaten, barren land; skating sometimes fast and light across thin ice, flying finally across the thick, slow, freezing, deadly Arctic. All to reach her brother and loosen winter’s grip on his heart. At each new lofty latitude, with each new loss of reassuring habitat and
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