Sweden has this place of Abisko National Park, in the far north, where in winter sunshine seldom reaches the horizon, and it comes out to seem more a dream than a place to visit. It is all silence and the instant you enter this frozen wilderness. It is not a dying silence, but a whole silence, full of the rustling of falling snow, of the creak of ice beneath the feet and of a rustle of wind through the trees of the birch.

It is the gentler side of the Arctic which the Abisko offers in winter. The air is so crisp as to be stinging on your cheeks, but is very much clean, and your lungs get filled up with a kind of electric freshness, almost. Days are brief, and every hour is as silent as a beauty. It is a low sun tinting the mountains in warm pinks and blues and when it goes down the world is like a piece of velvet curtaining night.

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A lot of tourists visit this place in search of the Northern Lights and with reason. One of the most favorable locations on the planet to appreciate them is Abisko. When you are standing on the icy bank of Lake Tornetrask, you will see a strip of green and purple across the sky. It is a moment that cannot be described that makes you forget the cold and the dark and everything. One thing locals believe to be the same about the lights is that it does not show the same lights twice, they have different dances every night, it is as though they are dancing to those that are patient and stay long enough to see them dance.

And the magic of Abisko is not solely in the heavens. It is in the poaching of the snow, in the powdered diamond sparkle of the moonlight, in the hotness of a wooden lodge where travellers have their coffee, and in the sense of being as small as a mote and as deeply alive in the Arctic silence as possible.