Whiteout, sometimes translated as white storm, is a situation in which the white of the fog, the low clouds and the snow make you lose all spatial reference. It is also the title of a mystery novel by the Icelandic writer Ragnar Jónasson, one of those Nordic authors who have become fashionable in recent years. Here and now, as we drive through the north of his country in the middle of winter, climbing a mountain pass on a particularly tortuous stretch of the Arctic Coast Way, this meteorological expression is distressingly apt. Through the windshields I can see absolutely nothing. Moving forward is difficult, since, in dangerous terrain like this, you can end up falling off a cliff or colliding with some invisible obstacle.