72 A SUMMER IN GREENLAND 



found in the sub-Antarctic region and reaches its 

 southern limit in lat. 62 S., a position correspond- 

 ing to that of the Faroe Islands and the south of 

 Finland in the northern hemisphere. 



The fringe of Greenland where the snow and 

 ice are discarded, like winter clothes, as soon as 

 the freezing-point is passed, in the more favoured 

 situations becomes a paradise of flowers not equal 

 in brilliance to Alpine meadows at their best but 

 characterised by a harmony of colour in keeping 

 with the sombre grandeur of the setting. The 

 barrenness of wind-swept slopes which on the melt- 

 ing of the snow are scarred by destroying streams 

 leaving in their track patches of withered shoots 

 pressed against the ground and dead dishevelled 

 Willows anchored by bared roots, like cables 

 dragged taut by the strain of rushing water (Fig. 

 29), intensifies the impression of sharp contrasts 

 that a Greenland landscape produces. Charles 

 Lamb's contemptuous description of seashore 

 vegetation in The Old Margate Hoy essay is applic- 

 able to some parts of an Arctic land : ' I hate those 

 scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage 

 from between the horrid fissures of dusty innu- 

 tritious rocks, which the amateur calls "verdure 

 to the edge of the sea." : But in the scrubbed 

 shoots of the Willows and the Dwarf Birch, with 

 their profusion of catkins, doomed by the force of 

 circumstances to lead a prostrate life on bare rock, 

 on the faces of cliffs, or creeping among a miniature 

 undergrowth of Moss, Lichen, and other plants, 

 there is a beauty that arrests attention ; and in the 



