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If the king of all the Goths would only stick up a lighthouse here and there along the edge of his Arctic seaboard, he would save many an honest fellow a heart-ache. I must now finish this long letter. Hammerfest is scarcely worthy of my wasting paper on it. When I tell you that it is the most northerly town in Europe, I think I have mentioned its only remarkable characteristic.
It was four o'clock, and as the season was near the last of July or first of August, he did not know the precise date within a week or two, he knew that the sun roughly marked the northwest. He looked to the south and knew that somewhere beyond those bleak hills lay the Great Bear Lake; also, he knew that in that direction the Arctic Circle cut its forbidding way across the Canadian Barrens.
At midday the sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world. But the rose-colour swiftly faded. The grey light of day that remained lasted until three o'clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.
The lines in turn were fastened by Attalaq and Papik to harpoons, which were to be driven into the walrus, the natives' chief prey of the arctic sea. A babel of conversation swayed to and fro among this northernmost fringe of the human race. Now and then it was drowned in the raucous, deafening shriek of auks which swarmed from nearby cliffs and soared in clouds over the shore. "Aveq soah! Walrus!
Now and then you shrink from the arctic winter, but in summer, in spite of the mosquitoes, the bush gets hold of you. Sometimes you hate the solitude; but when you leave it you long to return." "Ah," said Agatha, "I have not seen the wilderness, but next summer I hope to make an exploring trip." "But where?" "To the Shadow River and on into the Territories," she answered quietly.
The course of the second, until land was seen, was north, into northern seas, toward the north pole, in the direction of Iceland, to the cape of Labrador, at 58° north latitude. On the first voyage no ice was reported; on the second the leading features were bergs and floes of ice and long days of arctic summer.
The totals of the business done by the "Y" up in the Russian Arctic area are astounding, when the difficulties of transport are considered More than $1,000,000 worth of supplies were received and distributed before the American troops left Archangel.
To take but one particular it has produced a vast amount of literature, and will yet produce more. Before this appears in print, the new arctic expedition will probably have sailed, to make what we must consider as the final search for Sir John Franklin.
Of the fierce hunger, the wearing, unceasing fight against Arctic cold, and, when weakened and exhausted by both, the dumb, instinctive struggle for life against the combination, Bruce said nothing; but in a dozen commonplace sentences described physical sufferings sufficient for a lifetime which is the western way.
The gifts of nature are disregarded and undervalued till they are withdrawn, and in the hideous regions of the Arctic Zone, she would make a convert of him for whom the gardens of Europe had no charms, or the mild beauties of a southern climate had bloomed in vain. Mr. Williams found a delightful occupation in his agricultural pursuits.
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