The Polar Silence

[rj]

Scott Badger <lupine at ncia.net>
> 
> I agree with your point to a degree, but if there was any nobility, wouldn't
> those that recognized the value of the Eskimo's culture rather than assuming
> the superiority of the "White man's" technologies be more worthy of it?
> Though, in the end, their deaths were deserved for their arrogance, I will
> admit that the struggle and incredible will to stay alive displayed by the
> early explorers exhibited a certain kind of nobility.  Months of floating
> around on a disintegrating piece of ice, to be followed by months of
> floating around in an open whaleboat on the Arctic Ocean, certainly ain't no
> picnic.
> 
> To be fair, for all of these explorers, exploration and discovery seemed to
> quickly become secondary considerations.  They were possesed by the arctic
> and, I think, would have continued to return with or without any opportunity
> for "conquest".


I was also thinking of this very late sequence opening, one preceded by
a motto from the "Resolutions of the Gross Sucklings Conference" (!),
and again, conveyed by Another Narrator:

"North? What searcher has ever been directed *north*? What you're
supposed to be looking for lies south -- those dusky natives, right? For
danger and enterprise they send you west, for visions, east. But what's
north?
    The escape route of the *Anubis*.
    The Kirghiz Light.
    The Herero Country of Death." (GR706)

That's three strikes, for mine.

best