Quassitilua, August 1: I write from paradise . . . if such a label might still allow for healthy swarms of gnats and mosquitoes. I sit in south Greenland, on a plateau overlooking a seldom-visited fjord running to the north from the larger Bredesfjord. The latter had welcomed Erik the Red and his fellow Norse, or Viking, colonists from Iceland in the early 980s.
I look and listen in one direction and find two waterfalls tumbling down a 700-foot rocky slope. I look in another direction, and see the fjord itself, filled with icebergs. Many of these are "blue ice," the product of pressures found in the "mother" glaciers. Their rich and ethereal glow defies both camera and description. I look in a third direction and face the massive wall of ice that forms the great Greenland Ice Sheet; it looms like a giant cloudbank. Beside me flows a small whitewater stream, the liquid pure and cold. I cup my hands and drink deeply. A third waterfall begins a few yards downstream, falling another 200 feet to feed into the fjord.
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