People like to say it is illegal to die in Longyearbyen, the main town on Svalbard, about 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole. It isn’t. But the small cemetery on the hillside stopped taking burials around the middle of the last century, because the ground there never thaws, and nothing put into it goes back to being ground. In 1998 a team of scientists dug down to seven miners who had died in the 1918 flu, hoping the permafrost had kept the virus as carefully as it had kept the men. So people who are seriously ill are flown south to the mainland, and the town’s dead mostly end up somewhere else. Most ground keeps its dead by letting them go. This ground would keep them exactly, which is why it can’t be trusted with them.