In the great white land

by Gordon Stables

There is, I believe, no light in all the wide world half so bright and dazzling as that of the first brief day of an Arctic spring. Scarce can the human eye, so long accustomed to the soft, tender star-rays, the flickering, coloured aurora, or magic moon-beams, bear to look on the white wastes all around, which seem to have been sown with billions and trillions of tiny diamonds, the God-made prisms and crystals of the virgin snow, pure and white as brow of angel.

The ship towards which Captain Mayne Brace is slowly advancing looks, but for her masts and rigging, like a white marquee, for from stem to stern she had been roofed over, many, many moons ago, when first anchored here in the Gulf of Incognita high to the North, and west of Baffin’s Bay.

Snow-steps lead him aboard, and the surgeon himself meets him at the frozen gangway.

“Sick all doing well, sir,” says the doctor. “Every one been out to-day to peep at the sun, and the sight has done them all good, though it has made some of them long for the green glades and rolling woods of dear old England. But come below, captain, and thaw your beard. Dinner ready to dish up. Let me lead you. Mind that rope. Step high, and you’ll manage. There, now, catch hold of the rail, and I’ll go down the companion in front. Just fourteen steps. Make your feet your friends, and count.”

For Captain Mayne Brace was for the time being snow-blind.

At the foot of the ladder the steward helped him to get out of his ice-rig, and to thaw his beard and eyebrows, then led him in.

He looked old no longer, but brown-bearded, rosy, rubicund, and jolly—just as a sailor should be.

It was not, however, until the soup was finished—real pea-soup with some strength and body in it—that he once more regained his sight. He had shut his eyes and leaned back in his easy-chair while the steward was changing the plates, and when he looked again, he beheld the saloon table encircled with bright, youthful, and happy faces.

Faces with hope in them, eyes that danced with new-born joy; for after all these months of dreary darkness, of shrieking storms and blinding blizzards, had they not seen the sun at last? Yes, and the days would lengthen and lengthen till it would be all one long, bright Arctic day. The snows would melt in the glens yonder, avalanches would fall thundering into the valleys beneath, the tides would break the ice around; yonder mountain berg, which had loomed ghost-like all through the everlasting night of winter, would move seawards and away; then a week of mist, which would lift at length, and reveal hills already patched with the yellow and red of lichens and the green of mosses, soft and tender. For summer comes quickly in the Arctic.

And what then? Why, the birds would return in their tens of thousands, the gulls and gullimots, the malleys, the pilots, the beautiful angel-snowbird, and the wee snow-bunting itself. Then it would be summer, you see. Bears themselves, that slept in frozen pits or caves for months and months, would be on the prowl once more, and eke the Arctic foxes; the sea would be alive and teeming with fish, from great sharks down to the sportive and gay little ghahkas. Whales—the gigantic “right whales”—would dash into the bay, unicorns would be seen, great seals and walruses would scramble on to patches of ice to bask in the sunshine; and, spreading white sails now to woo the breeze, the Walrus barque would steam slowly away through the opening ice, all hands intent on making their fortunes, that in a “bumper ship” they might sail southwards long before the autumn winds began to blow.