“The deep blue is an iceberg,” he laughed. “Yes, and the snow is really that color—by reflection. The man is a Samoyed who bartered everything he owned—reindeer, walrus, ivory, dogs, and sledges—to an adventurous dealer from the nearest settlements for a robe of scarlet woolen stuff. Then, in his scarlet cloak, he wandered about in the sunlight for ten days, in an ecstatic trance, silent, good-for-nothing, living on his family, drunk with the glory of that scarlet garment!”
Traveling With a Woman Scout
The man was Danillo, the brother-in-law of Ireena, a woman scout of whom Borissoff speaks frequently in his reminiscences, and whose wonderful gift of “seeing” by atmospheric signs the country beyond the horizon and divining where the trails lay gave her a position of peculiar dignity among her tribesfolk. This woman was their sole and undisputed guide through the monotonous flat wastes of snow. Among the last of the pagans of Europe woman’s place is certainly higher than it is supposed to have been before the dawn of Christianity. A woman like Ireena may hold the tribal-family together; revive courage in dire surroundings; decide momentous debates as to reindeer-speculation; practise medicine and surgery; withstand the redoubtable devils of blizzard and thaw; serve the bad Siadey in his bloody sanctuary; and even dare the unmentionable good god’s isolating stretches of white cold, to serve an inquisitive painter from the South.
It was Ireena and Danillo who took Borissoff to the last pagan shrines of Europe, never visited before by a European.
“In the background,” says Borissoff, “one sees mountains of floating icebergs of tremendous dimensions, prevented from approaching the coast by submarine reefs. Here, on the edge of the Arctic, are the cliffs containing the Holy Place, reached only after a terrible journey over icy rocks and fearful ravines, through riverbeds stuffed with snow, up snowy slopes in intricate zig-zags, where the reindeer floundered and protested.”
Borissoff’s Pilgrimage to the Last Pagan Shrines of Europe
“THE COUNTRY OF THE DEAD”—A STUDY OF THE KARA SEA IN AUGUST
Three versts’ distance from the shrine, they stopped on the threshold of the Samoyed Mecca. Borissoff stumbled over huge mounds of idols heaped between cliffs, one of them so great that forty sledges could not have removed the idols. He passed mountains of deer-skulls, antlers, and skulls of polar bears; and heaps of rusty axes, knives, chains, fragments of anchors, harpoons, and parts of rifles brought as offerings over weary leagues. The Samoyeds often drive 414 here from a thousand miles away, stop at the threshold of this dwelling-place of the supreme Idol-God of the polar regions, and, killing a domestic deer as the least sacrifice, besprinkle the shrine with its blood.