Word: tundras
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...eons, the frozen north was terra incognita, the work of a mapmaker's imagination. Now it is the turn of writers to define its contours. The latest lyricist is Journalist Barry Lopez. "Much of the tundra," he notes, "appears to be treeless when, in many places, it is actually covered with trees--a thick matting of short, ancient willows and birches. You realize suddenly that you are wandering around on top of a forest." Icebergs the size of Cleveland drift through the dark waters, and sulfur butterflies mysteriously rise in the short, delirious summer. Mirages provide a weird history...
...follow in the wake of her newfound renown. That means somehow joining the circus of Colonel Kearney, a bizarre Kentuckian who has hired Fevvers to join a historic round-the-world tour: the American plans to outstrip Hannibal, taking a full troupe of performers and animals ("tuskers across the tundra!") from St. Petersburg to Japan, by way of Siberia, and thence on to Seattle. Walser is hired as a clown...
...turns into a fiasco: a clown goes mad, an enraged tigress must be shot. Offstage, Fevvers nearly surrenders her putative virtue to a Russian grand duke. The trip on the Great Siberian Railway brings worse tidings: sabotage, derailment, kidnaping outlaws. Walser loses himself and his memory in the vast tundra, while Fevvers realizes that the vanished reporter has stolen a piece of her heart...
...John Franklin's ill-fated expedition in search of the Northwest Passage were trapped by thick ice near Canada's remote Beechey Island. Over the next year, the 129 men on board struggled to survive, setting up a supply shop and smithy on the frozen tundra, but all eventually perished. Now that he has recovered three bodies, Beattie says, scientists can try to learn whether it was scurvy, toxins in the food or merely despair that killed the stranded crew...
...cargo bays are filled with booze. The town is dry-it used to be wet, with a package store that deposited $4,000 a day in earnings in the Alaska National Bank of the North, the only bank in town, but people were getting drunk, staggering off on the tundra and freezing to death, so it was voted dry. Now the only way to get a drink is to order spirits in from outside. People call liquor stores that service the bush from Anchorage or Fairbanks, ask for E.S.P. (expedited small package) rate, and pay $36.75 freight...