All of Borissoff's paintings were done in the ice zone beyond the 70th parallel of north latitude, in the district between Archangel and the Yalmal Peninsula. He never tires of telling of the peculiar color-tones of this region, and the curious psychological effects of its distance, silence, and isolation. Living amid its singular light phenomena, where the spring-time snow turns pink against blue icebergs, and the boggy midsummer tundra swims in a sea of orange-red against a sky of aquamarine, even the Samoyed becomes a color worshiper. "Why does that man sit in a scarlet cloak on rose-colored snow against a solid background of dark blue?" I asked, examining one of Borissoff's paintings. "The deep blue is an iceberg," he laughed. "Yes, and the snow is really that color--by reflection. The man is a Samoyed who bartered everything he owned--reindeer, walrus, ivory, dogs, and sledges--to an adventurous dealer from the nearest settlements for a robe of scarlet woolen stuff. Then, in his scarlet cloak, he wandered about in the sunlight for ten days, in an ecstatic trance, silent, good-for-nothing, living on his family, drunk with the glory of that scarlet garment!" _Traveling With a Woman Scout_ The man was Danillo, the brother-in-law of Ireena, a woman scout of whom Borissoff speaks frequently in his reminiscences, and whose wonderful gift of "seeing" by atmospheric signs the country beyond the horizon and divining where the trails lay gave her a position of peculiar dignity among her tribesfolk. This woman was their sole and undisputed guide through the monotonous flat wastes of snow. Among the last of the pagans of Europe woman's place is certainly higher than it is supposed to have been before the dawn of Christianity. A woman like Ireena may hold the tribal-family together; revive courage in dire surroundings; decide momentous debates as to reindeer-speculation; practise medicine and surgery; withstand the redoubtable devils of blizzard and thaw; serve the bad Siadey in his bloody sanctuary; and even dare the unmentionable good god's isolating stretches of white cold, to serve an inquisitive painter from the South. It was Ireena and Danillo who took Borissoff to the last pagan shrines of Europe, never visited before by a European. "In the background," says Borissoff, "one sees mountains of floating icebergs of tremendous dimensions, prevented from approaching the coast by submarine reefs. Here, on the edge of the Arctic, are the cliffs containing the Holy Place, reached only after a terrible journey over icy rocks and fearful ravines, through riverbeds stuffed with snow, up snowy slopes in intricate zig-zags, where the reindeer floundered and protested." _Borissoff's Pilgrimage to the Last Pagan Shrines of Europe_ [Illustration: "THE COUNTRY OF THE DEAD"--A STUDY OF THE KARA SEA IN AUGUST]