The only other humans who had settled on that side of Greenland were five hundred miles to the south, separated by impassable mountains and glaciers. To the north was nine hundred miles of frozen wilderness, inhabited only by animals and a dozen or so Danish soldiers who were doing two-year shifts on the world’s most arduous patrol. To the west was the Greenlandic ice sheet—up to two miles thick and filled with perilous crevasses. The town was supplied by a ship from Denmark, fourteen hundred miles to the east: once in late summer and once in early autumn, before the pack ice re-formed, rendering passage impossible. Amid this isolation, the town’s name rang out as a riddle: Ittoqqortoormiit, the “place of the large houses.” Large houses? Compared with what?