Smilla crosses Copenhagen Harbor on the ice

Smilla’s crossing of Copenhagen Harbor on the ice is a stealth approach to the White Palace and a test of how far her knowledge of frozen landscapes can carry her in the city. Disguised in borrowed clothes, she crosses a channel of unstable ice, finds the tracks of a concealed man, and chooses to wait in the cold rather than retreat. The harbor becomes both a physical hazard and an extension of the freedom she associates with life in Greenland.

Approach and Disguise

At Harbor Street, Smilla asks her companion for his shoes and cap, receives them without explanation, and tells him to wait an hour, but no longer. She descends a vertical wooden ladder built into the wharf and steps onto the harbor ice. Her Burberry coat feels stiff in the cold, and the borrowed shoes seem as thin as eggshells, but their white color matters: with the coat and cap, they help her blend into the ice in case someone is watching the White Palace.

The crossing is not a simple walk over a frozen surface. Along the bulwark, small ice packs have formed, and Smilla estimates them to be more than four inches thick. The channel itself is the danger: dark slush lies between the more solid edges. She moves toward the White Palace along a strip of grease ice held together by a thin, dark crust known as rotten ice, which is crumbling from below. Keeping to the edge, she steps from one floe to another, then leaps the final gap as the current carries the ice through the harbor at roughly half a knot. She reaches the other side without getting her feet wet.

The White Palace and the Tracks

The White Palace is dark when Smilla arrives. The stillness seems to extend beyond its windows into the walls, playground, stairways, and bare tree trunks. From the canal she approaches behind the bicycle sheds, moving slowly and cautiously. She scans the parked cars and dark entrances for signs of movement, then turns her attention to the thin layer of newly fallen snow.

With no moon, the tracks take time to emerge. Smilla finds a single row of footprints: a large person wearing a Vibram sole has crossed the bridge, gone behind the building, and entered beneath the shed roof in front of her. There are no tracks leading back out. The print pattern gives her a concrete basis for sensing that someone is nearby, even though she can hear, smell, and see nothing. The harbor crossing has brought her to the building, but the tracks reveal that the final approach is occupied.

Waiting in the Cold

Smilla stays against the wall for twenty minutes. As the cold makes her shake, she pulls away from it to avoid making a sound. She considers giving up and returning by the route she came, but remains where she is because she despises fear and sees facing its center as the way toward fearlessness. The waiting is physical as well as tactical: at nine degrees Fahrenheit, she compares her ability to endure the cold with her mother's and with Greenlandic hunters, while imagining how most Europeans would betray themselves with a cough, a rustle, or a shift of weight.

The man she senses is less than a yard away, yet he makes no sound. Smilla believes he must think himself alone, and she does not move. When the cold makes her eyes water, she closes them briefly. On opening them, she sees a shadow detach from the shed roof and move off: a tall figure with a quick, fluid gait, something white above his head, perhaps a hat. She does not hear him leave. The passage ends with the threat withdrawing rather than being identified, leaving the tracks and the brief glimpse as the limits of what she has learned.

Ice, Freedom, and the Observer

The episode gives practical form to Smilla's sense that spatial freedom is something to be guarded. Her childhood memories are of a life in which being indoors was unusual and staying in one place for long was unthinkable; she describes freedom of movement as something she cradles and worships. Against that background, the harbor ice is not merely a route across town. It offers a way around watched entrances and ordinary streets, but it is also unstable, dark, and lethal underfoot.

The passage also places Greenlandic knowledge beside the built environment of Copenhagen. Smilla reads the floes, current, and rotten ice as immediate conditions for action, just as she draws on the quiet endurance she associates with her mother and Greenlandic hunters. That knowledge gives her an advantage, but not mastery: she reaches the White Palace without getting wet, yet cannot see the man whose footprints have led her to wait. The scene's tension rests on that difference between reading a landscape and controlling what it conceals.