but the air-shell that
shuts in our globe bends the rays of light, so that the sun appears
before his theoretical rising, and remains in sight after his
theoretical setting. At the pole, in fact, the single "half-yearly
day" is a week longer than the one "half-yearly night."

At the North Pole there is only one direction--south. One could go
south in as many ways as there are points on the compass card, but
every one of these ways is south; east and west have vanished. The
hour of the day at the pole is a paradoxical conception, for that
point is the meeting place of every meridian, and the time of all
holds good, so that it is always any hour one cares to mention.
Unpunctuality is hence impossible--but the question grows complex, and
its practical solution concerns few.

No one needs to go to the pole to discover all that makes that
point different from any other point of the surface. But the whole
polar regions are full of unknown things, which every Arctic
explorer of the right stamp looks forward to finding. And the reward
he looks forward to most is the approval of the few who understand and
love knowledge for its own sake, rather than the noisy applause of
the crowd who would cheer him, after all, much as they cheer a
winning prize-fighter, or race-horse, or political candidate.

The difficulties that make the quest of the pole so arduous have been
discovered by slow degrees. It is marvellous how soon nearly the full
limits of northward attainment were reached. In 1596 Barents
discovered Spitzbergen in about 78 deg. north; in 1770 Hudson reached
80 deg.; in 1827 Parry, by sledging on the ice when his ship became fast,
succeeded in touching 82 deg. 45'. Since then all the enormous resources
of modern science--steam, electricity, preserved foods and the
experience of centuries--have only enabled forty miles of additional
poleward advance to be made.

The accompanying map gives a fair idea of the form of the Arctic
regions, and remembering that the circle marked 80 deg. is distant seven
hundred miles from the pole, the reader can realize the distances
involved. The Arctic Basin, occupied by the Arctic Sea, is ringed in
by land; the northern coasts of America, Europe, and Asia, forming a
roughly circular boundary broken by three well-marked channels
communicating with the ocean. Bering Strait between America and Asia
is the narrowest, Baffin Bay between America and Greenland is wider,
branching into a number of