He set out, walking like a man in a race.  And long before the twilight hours of sleep they were sweeping out ahead of him in all their glory—­the Barren Lands of the map-makers, his paradise.  On a knoll he stood in the golden sun and looked about him.  He set his pack down and stood with bared head, a whispering of cool wind in his hair.  If Mary Standish could have lived to see this!  He stretched out his arms, as if pointing for her eyes to follow, and her name was in his heart and whispering on his silent lips.  Immeasurable the tundras reached ahead of him—­rolling, sweeping, treeless, green and golden and a glory of flowers, athrill with a life no forest land had ever known.  Under his feet was a crush of forget-me-nots and of white and purple violets, their sweet perfume filling his lungs as he breathed.  Ahead of him lay a white sea of yellow-eyed daisies, with purple iris high as his knees in between, and as far as he could see, waving softly in the breeze, was the cotton-tufted sedge he loved.  The pods were green.  In a few days they would be opening, and the tundras would be white carpets.

He listened to the call of life.  It was about him everywhere, a melody of bird-life subdued and sleepy even though the sun was still warmly aglow in the sky.  A hundred times he had watched this miracle of bird instinct, the going-to-bed of feathered creatures in the weeks and months when there was no real night.  He picked up his pack and went on.  From a pool hidden in the lush grasses of a distant hollow came to him the twilight honking of nesting geese and the quacking content of wild ducks.  He heard the reed-like, musical notes of a lone “organ-duck” and the plaintive cries of plover, and farther out, where the shadows seemed deepening against the rim of the horizon, rose the harsh, rolling notes of cranes and the raucous cries of the loons.  And then, from a clump of willows near him, came the chirping twitter of a thrush whose throat was tired for the day, and the sweet, sleepy evening song of a robin. Night! Alan laughed softly, the pale flush of the sun in his face. Bedtime! He looked at his watch.

It was nine o’clock.  Nine o’clock, and the flowers still answering to the glow of the sun!  And the people down there—­in the States—­called it a frozen land, a hell of ice and snow at the end of the earth, a place of the survival of the fittest!  Well, to just such extremes had stupidity and ignorance gone through all the years of history, even though men called themselves super-creatures of intelligence and knowledge.  It was humorous.  And it was tragic.

At last he came to a shining pool between two tufted ridges, and in this velvety hollow the twilight was gathering like a shadow in a cup.  A little creek ran out of the pool, and here Alan gathered soft grass and spread out his blankets.  A great stillness drew in about him, broken only by the old squaws and the loons.  At eleven o’clock he could still see clearly the sleeping water-fowl on the surface of the pool.  But the stars were appearing.  It grew duskier, and the rose-tint of the sun faded into purple gloom as pale night drew near—­four hours of rest that was neither darkness nor day.  With a pillow of sedge and grass under his head he slept.