Loyen’s discovery of the meteorite at Gela Alta begins not with a triumphant scientific claim but with attention to Inuit stories. In Smilla’s account, the find launches a sequence of expeditions whose technical ambitions repeatedly outrun what their participants can understand, making the stone both a material object and the center of an unresolved history.

A discovery grounded in local knowledge

Loyen first came to Gela Alta in the thirties with a German expedition. Its members planned preliminary construction for an airport on a narrow strip of flat coast on the north side of the island and brought Thule Inuit with them; West Greenlanders would not join because the island had a bad reputation. Loyen began searching as Knud Rasmussen had when he found his meteorites: by taking Inuit stories seriously. The account identifies this approach, rather than a technical method, as the path that led him to the meteorite.

The discovery therefore sits uneasily beside the expedition’s infrastructural purpose. The visitors came to prepare an airport, while the decisive clue emerged from a willingness to attend to stories that outside institutions might have dismissed. Smilla’s later reflections on understanding another culture sharpen this contrast: understanding comes through living among people, learning their language, and accepting the limits of explanation, not by placing them on an external scale.

Expeditions and the unfinished passage

Loyen returned in 1966 with Ving and Andreas Fine Licht. By then the group knew of the stone, but, as Smilla recounts, they lacked the knowledge needed to solve the technical problems involved in reaching it. They constructed a permanent passageway to the meteorite, yet the expedition was cut short before that work could yield a complete resolution.

In 1991 the expedition returned, and Smilla’s group came along as well. They were forced to go home. The sequence—discovery, an engineered passage, interruption, and return—makes the meteorite’s history less a completed triumph than a chain of attempts whose practical and historical consequences remain unsettled. The passageway is a concrete mark of access pursued, but not of understanding achieved.

The story around the stone

The discovery is related during a tense conversation in darkness, when the speaker describes the expeditions while Smilla tries to understand why he is still lying even though he has control of the situation. Her next question concerns the pieces cut off the meteorite. That immediate concern turns the discovery story toward what was removed and what remains unexplained, rather than allowing the find to settle into a closed account of scientific achievement.

The narrative also places the meteorite’s history beside Smilla’s embodied knowledge of Greenland. Her memories include hunting, food, kinship, and the freedom of moving through a landscape where her family could not imagine remaining indoors or in one place for long. These details do not supply a technical explanation of the stone; they show the difference between knowledge formed through lived practice and the institutional narratives that classify people and places from a distance. Loyen’s respect for Inuit stories briefly crosses that divide, while the interrupted expeditions and missing pieces preserve its unresolved edge.