20 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



magnified creaking of a rusty hinge. There is the crashing when 

 cakes as big as a church wall, after being tilted on edge, finally pass 

 beyond their equilibrium and topple down upon the ice; and when 

 extensive floes, perhaps six or more feet in thickness, gradually bend 

 under the resistless pressure of the pack until they buckle up and 

 snap, there is a groaning as of supergiants in torment and a boom- 

 ing which at a distance of a mile or two sounds like a cannonade. 



"The eternal polar silence," writes the poet in his London attic. 

 But Shackleton's men, as quoted in his book "South," now and again 

 commence their diary entries with the words "din. Din, DIN." 

 Robert Service some distance south of the arctic circle in a small 

 house in the city of Dawson, wrote much of the arctic silence. 

 But we of the far north never forget the boom and screech and 

 roar of the polar pack. 



The literary north is barren, dismal and desolate. Here we are 

 dealing with words of indefinite meaning into which each of us 

 reads what significance he chooses. 



Part of my bringing up was on the level and treeless Dakota 

 prairie where I heard daily plaints from my mother expressed in 

 one or another and sometimes in all of these adjectives. She had 

 been brought up within sight of magnificent snow-capped moun- 

 tains with deep purples and blues in the folds of the hills, and what 

 she was really complaining about was that the prairies had no 

 mountains in the distance. They were also treeless, but so had 

 been my mother's mountain home, and she had no longing for trees 

 and even almost a dislike for them. I heard the same complaints 

 of the dreariness and desolation of the prairie from our neighbors. 

 They, like us, were newcomers, but from a country of forest and 

 hill. No doubt they had read much of the beauty of the mountains 

 and were willing to concede it in the abstract, but what they were 

 lonesome for was the shade and the rustle of trees and the relief 

 to the eye of hedgerows and orchards. To my mother desolation 

 meant absence of mountains; to them it meant absence of trees; 

 but to me, brought up on the prairie, the desolation was not per- 

 ceived and the complaints were cries without meaning. When I 

 later moved to a country of hills and woods I had a feeling of being 

 restrained, shut in. A mountain on the horizon does not trouble me. 

 But even to this day when I get close in among them my most 

 pronounced feeling is that they shut out the view. No matter how 

 high the peak that you climb, there are all around other peaks, 

 each with its secret behind it. No landscape is open, free, fair and 

 aboveboard but the level prairie or the wide-stretching sea. 



