Flying from Abu Dhabi to Washington, DC, I was sitting next to a window on the starboard side of the plane.

I had fallen asleep and when I looked out the window, we were above an enormous frozen sea, white and faint blue, abutting an ice-scarred landscape of islands and mainland cut with straight and narrow lines, some filled with snow and ice. In the frozen sea, I swear, I saw a castle. The landscape was like something from a Professor Challenger story or the further, strange travels of Arthur Gordon Pym.

It was Greenland as it turned out, but not long after I first saw it, we flew past the western edge of it and it was gone and it was one of the saddest moments of my life.