Some years ago, I camped on the top of the Greenland ice cap with a team of keen atmospheric chemists. We were twenty-three in number, and the manufacturer of our extreme-environment tents had branded them Arctic Ovens. They were double-walled pyramids with a dark lining designed to absorb solar radiation and therefore heat the interior. I had time enough to reflect that the name was misleading and the design flawed (the tent was too big for the sun’s rays to heat the air inside). The mercury regularly subsided to a demoralising -27°C.

Greenland’s frozen coating, which is three thousand metres thick in some places, covers 80 per cent of the island – a place four times the size of France. Like the musk oxen grazing the narrow coastal band, the ice on which I camped is a relic of the last ice age. The scientists in what we semi-fondly christened Tent City were measuring halogens coming off the snowpack in parts of one or two per trillion. The data, my colleagues hoped, might unlock the secrets of global warming. The landscape was entirely without topographical features – just a glittering white plain that thrummed with energy as it batted back the sun’s heat. An ectoplasmic fog blurred the horizon and no bird sang.

Only the most warm-hearted book could absorb the horrors of the interminable white nights. And I had one. In An African in Greenland, written in French and first published in English in 1981, Togolese writer Tété-Michel Kpomassie tells the engrossing story of his arrival on the world’s biggest island in