Silva runs the Ataa Holiday Camp. The Ilullisat Tourist Service will cheerfully book you there, because Silva is a Man Of Some Repute in Ilullisat. In 1915 Ataa held 59 residents, nine of whom were hunters. The station chief was the only Dane. The people lived in six houses and three tents, with a school, the manager s house, a workshop and a storehouse for seal blubber.
Nobody lives here full time now.
The nearest settlement today is at a place called Qertaq, thirty kilometers down the coast. Ataa camp itself sits at the base of ancient, rounded hills, all 1000 meters or less, whose precambrian gneisses were finally exposed only 7000 or 8000 years ago, when the ice cap most recently melted away. In fact, Ataa in Greenlandic means its lower part - the base of the hills. Silva wore the only clothes we ever saw him in, Nikes and sweat pants, big graying mustache and tousled hair, perched uncertainly on the zodiac, garroulous and growling. We warmed up with coffee in a yellow plyboard building built by Silva s own hand, improbably, on rocks some few meters from lapping waters, that served as a headquarters and common meeting point.