He was taken before their chief—the Jarl—who lives in a stone palace, built as solidly as the pyramids. “Glass is unknown, and curtains or draperies take its place in the windows. Oil-lamps are used, except in the palaces of the nobility and in public places, where an electric light, much brighter than gas, is substituted.” Precious stones, gold, and silver, abound. “The Jarl drives out with four large moose, or mastodon, attached to his chariot, which are harnessed in pairs, the inside horns of each being cut so that they will not interlock. His pleasure barge is drawn by walruses.” Barges and boats were commonly drawn by domesticated seals and walruses. Their arts and productions are described in detail, and are about the same as those of Northern Europe a thousand years ago. The people are numerous, and live in peace and happiness. The sun is their great spirit; shut in by eternal snow and ice, although their own climate is not very severe, they naturally look upon cold as the essence of all that is evil, and ice as its embodiment. When the genial rays of the sun disperse the ice and snow they worship and rejoice. And carrying out the same idea, the infernal regions are stated to be cold, not hot. We all remember the worthy divine in the north of Scotland, who knowing that he could not terrify his shivering congregation by depicting the terrors of fire, painted in its place an Arctic Hell. So Dante, in “The Divine Comedy,” makes the frozen Lake of Cocytus a place where the traitors to kindred and country endure a new torment. So again Shakespeare, in the well-known soliloquy— “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the de-lighted(13) spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbèd ice.” The narrator goes on to say that it is usual to make ice idols or ice demons for their carnivals; and ice palaces like those often constructed in Russia are also common in winter. He further says that Greenland extends to the Pole and far beyond it, and ends his narrative by stating that at the date on which he writes—May 22nd, 1861—he had been eleven months on the polar continent, and had no desire to leave it. So much for a _canard_, amusing at least from the mock earnestness of the writer. But that a detached colony of descendants from the Northmen _might_ be found at some more distant point of Greenland with which we are at present not familiar, is at least possible, and that the climate of the Pole is comparatively temperate has been the belief of some authorities, although, most assuredly, the intense cold experienced by the expedition under Captain Nares at the high latitude attained will not bear out the assertion. [Illustration: THE ARCTIC YACHT _PANDORA_.] CHAPTER X. CRUISE OF THE “PANDORA.”