Under The Northern Lights by Alan Sullivan

Kahdoosh, the Man with a Nose like a Bottle, sat on a flat stone that happened to be on the west coast of Greenland, and stared gloomily at a cluster of topecks huddled on a strip of ground near the shore. The sun was bright and very hot. He scrutinised a pack of mangy dogs hunting for offal along the edge of the sea, saw a group of women go off in the oomiak, or skin boat, screaming with laughter and a great splashing of paddles, and noted with cold and critical gaze that Larpan, the Cross-eyed One, had got into his kayack. He was going to the rocky islands two miles away over the emerald water to determine whether the walrus had yet arrived.

Watching the dipping stroke of double blades that flashed like mirrors in the sun, Kahdoosh felt more than ever a violent antipathy to Larpan. The immediate cause of this was Peegish, the Chatterer, a cylindrical maiden of nineteen years. Again the eternal triangle. What need to point out that whether in Greenland or Tooting, whether beneath silk or caribou-skin, the human heart aspires with the same longings, throbs with the same profound passion? Tooting may be more voluble than Greenland, but it can harbour no deeper emotions. The Thames Embankment may be more impressive than the rocky waste in which Peegish was acknowledged to be the leading flapper, but no lover ever leaned on its massive parapet and gazed more moodily at Chelsea Bridge than Kahdoosh now gazed at his particular section of the Arctic Ocean.