stood there erect, buoyant, smiling. She, too, is like a figure from the Sagas, and of the same lineage as he. If she has her hours of anguish, no one shall see her bowed down. She has only one confidant-her art. After the terrible crisis, it took possession of the empty home, gently but decisively. To sit idle and wait would, for her, have meant to go mad. She had her own vocation and her right. She was not a woman only, but a human being to boot. Out of the empty desolation rose the need for activity, independence, the craving to make a career for herself in good earnest, to mount above the throng, and stand on something like an equal footing with him when, in the fulness of time, she should give him her hand in welcome home. It was in November 1895 that she made her first appearance outside her own country and her own town. The moment was a trying one, no doubt; but the public. of Stockholm, a public accustomed to fine voices and good methods, received her with sympathy and enthusiasm. The first step was taken, and the road lay clear before her. CHAPTER XIV ARCTIC EXPEDITIONS FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES By AKSEL ARSTAL THERE is no royal road to the North Pole, unless, indeed, in this sense, that the ways to it are open to kings alonekings among men. The mark of true royalty has always been that courage which is begotten of will, born of strength, and nurtured by intelligence. We do not reckon Arctic exploration among the highest problems of humanity. Life certainly presents even sterner tests of courage and self-sacrifice than those to which the explorer, or for that matter the soldier, is subjected. But the history of Polar exploration-that battle of the human soul and body against Nature in the guise of the ice sphinx, that campaign of the spirit of inquiry, of investigation, with its faithful vigils through the long nights of shuddering cold-forms one of the most moving chapters in the human Bible, the record of our race with its destiny's seal on its brow,' the story of greatly willing, acting, and suffering man. It is a chapter of victorious defeats. 6 Polar exploration is now in its third millennium. If the North Pole is reached in this century or the next, the boundary of knowledge within the Polar Circle will have moved forward, on an average, something under a mile for every 1 Peer Gynt, Act V. Sc. 10. |