The foreshortening illusion is powerful, born of the air’s pristine clarity, and it is the first of countless misprisions of scale I will experience in Greenland. This is, I will learn, a landscape that plays tricks on the eye, dupes perception, induces forms of clarity that are in fact forms of delusion. Rock and ice walls reflect and redirect sound misleadingly: events occurring ahead of us seem to issue from behind. There are no usual units to which the eye has become accustomed: no buildings, no cars, no distant people. The terrain is built out of a few elements – rock, ice, water – that
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