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 
