Perhaps I was struck most by the absence of trees.
Some five days after I had acquired the slave girl, Arlene, following the herd of Tancred, generally climbing, I came to the edge of Ax Glacier. There I found the camp of Imnak, and Thimble and Thistle.
'I have been waiting for you,' had said Imnak. 'I thought you would come.'
'Why did you think this?' I had asked.
'I saw the furs and supplies you put aside for yourself when we were near the wall,' he said. 'You have business in the north.'
'It is true,' I said.
He did not ask me my business. He was a red hunter. If I wished to tell him, he knew that I would. I decided that I would speak to him later. In my pouch was the small carving, in bluish stone, of the head of a Kur, one with an ear half torn away.
'I had hoped you would wait for me,' I said. 'It might be difficult otherwise for one such as myself to cross the ice.
I knew that he had watched me prepare my pack.
Imnak grinned. 'It was you,' said he, 'who freed the tabuk.' Then he turned to his girls. 'Break camp,' he had told them. 'I am anxious to go home.'
With Imnak's help we would cross Ax Glacier and find the Innuit, as they called themselves, a word which, in their own tongue, means 'the People.' I recalled that in the message of Zarendargar he had referred to himself as a war general of the 'People.' He had meant, of course, I assumed, his own people, or kind. Various groups are inclined to so identify themselves. It is an arrogance which is culturally common. The Innuit do not have 'war generals.' War, in its full sense, is unknown to them. They live generally in scattered, isolated communities. It is as though two families lived separated in a vast remote area. There would be little point and little likelihood to their having a war. In the north one needs friends, not enemies. In good years, when the weather is favorable, there tends to be enough sleen and tabuk, with careful hunting, to meet their needs. One community is not likely to be much better or worse of than another. There is little loot to be acquired. What one needs one can generally hunt or make for oneself. There is little point in stealing from someone what one can as simply acquire for oneself. Within given groups, incidentally, theft is rare. The smallness of the groups provides a powerful social control. If one were to steal something where would one hide or sell it? Besides, if one wished something someone else owned and let this be known, the owner would quite possibly give it to you, expecting, of course, to receive as valuable a gift in return. Borrowing, too, is prevalent among the red hunters. The loan of furs, tools and women is common.
I looked downward, out across the ice of Ax Glacier. Beyond it lay the polar basin.
The north is a hard country. When one must apply oneself almost incessantly to the tasks of survival there is little time to indulge oneself in the luxury of conquest.
Thimble and Thistle dismantled the hides and poles of Imnak's tent, and began to load them on the sled.
Violence, of course, is not unknown among the Innuit. They are men.
Aside, however, from consideratiolis such as the fewness, comparatively, of their numbers, and their geographical separation, and the pointlessness of an economics of war in their environment, the Innuit seem, also, culturally, or perhaps even genetically, disposed in ways which do not incline one to organized, systematic group violence. For example, they seem generally to be a kindly, genial folk. Hostility seems foreign to them. Strangers are welcomed. Hospitality is generous, honest, open-hearted and sincere. Some animals, doubtless, have better dispositions than others. The Innuit, on the whole, seem to be happy, pleasant fellows.'Perhaps that is why they live where they do. They have been unable, or unwilling, to compete with more aggressive groups. Their gentleness has resulted, it seems, in their being driven to the world's end. Where no others have desired to live the Innuit, sociable and loving, have found their bleak refuge.
Imnak's whip cracked down across the bare back of Thimble, the blond, who had been Barbara Benson, and she cried out and wept, 'I hurry, Master!' She busied herself with loading the sled. Thistle, the dark-haired girl, who had once been the rich Audrey Brewster, hurried, too, lest it would be her own back which next would feel the lash.
The red hunters, though a genial folk, keep their animals under a firm discipline.
'I see you, too, have a beast,' he said, looking beyond me to the lovely Arlene.
She stood back, in the light snow, frightened of the red hunter. She wore a sleeveless jacket of fur, belted with binding fiber, which depended to her knees; fur leggings; and skins wrapped and tied on her feet. I had improvised these garments for her. I looked at her. She did not even know enough to kneel.
'Those garments,' said Imnak, 'will be insufficient in the north.'
'Perhaps you could teach her,' I suggested, 'to sew herself more adequate clothing.'
'I have showed my girls,' he said. 'They will teach her.'
'Thank you,' I said.
It was rather beneath the dignity of a man to show a girl how to sew. Imnak had done this with Thimble and Thistle and did not wish to repeat the task. It is enough for a girl to teach a girl to sew.
'I see you have leather on your throat,' said Thimble to Arlene.
'I see your breasts are uncovered,' said Arlene to Thimble.
'Remove your jacket,' I told Arlene. Angrily, she did so. Imnak's pupils dilated. He would welcome this lovely she in our small herd.
'Into the traces,' said Imnak.
Thimble and Thistle bent down and each looped the broad band of her trace across her body.
'You are animals, aren't you?' called Arlene to them.
'Can you rig another trace?' I asked Imnak.
'Of course,' he said.
Soon Arlene, too, to her fury, stood in harness.
Imnak cracked his whip over their heads and they threw their weight against the traces and the long, narrow, freighted sled eased upward, over the rocks, and then slid down onto the ice of Ax Glacier. Imnak and I held the rear of the sled that it not move too rapidly downward. The ice of Ax Glacier, where we crossed it, had been cut by the countless hooves of the herd of Tancred; leaving a trial of marked ice more than one hundred and fifty yards wide. We would follow the herd.
It took ten days to cross Ax Glacier. There are many glacial lines among the rocks and mountains of the north, but Ax Glacier is easily the broadest and most famous. These glaciers, like frozen rivers or lakes of ice, or emptying seas, depend to the shores of Thassa, seeking her, flowing some few feet a year, imperceptibly like stone, to her chill waters. More than once we heard gigantic crashes as hundreds of feet or more of ice broke away from the glacial edge and tumbled roaring into the sea. It is thus, of course, that icebergs are formed. These great pieces and mountains of ice, shattering from the brinks of Ax Glacier and her smaller sisters, in time, drifting, carried by currents, would reach the northern sea, that eastward-reaching extension of Thassa rimming the polar basin. It was in that northern, or polar, sea that there was said to exist, if it were not myth or invention, the 'mountain that did not move,' that iceberg which, in defiance of tide, wind and current, stood immobilely fixed. Sometimes we could see, from where we stood, the sea, with these great pieces of ice within it. Some of these pieces of ice reared more than a thousand feet into the air. Sometimes they are even miles long. Their occasional vastnesses, and the might of the forces that have formed them, become even more impressive when it is understood that what one can see above the surface does little more than hint at what lies below. The fresh-water ice from which such blocks are formed is less dense than the salt water in which they float, weighing only about seven eighths as much. Thus, in a given piece of such ice, there is some seven times more beneath the surface than appears visible above it. These pieces of ice, like moving, drifting reefs, can be hazardous to shipping. The smaller ones, especially at night, can be particularly dangerous. Gorean ships, however, seldom run afoul of them. They are, generally, very shallow-drafted, which permits them to come much closer to such ice without the danger that would threaten deeper-keeled craft; too, the Gorean ship, because of the shallow draft, can occasionally run up on such ice, sliding onto it, rather than breaking apart when it strikes it; too, the Gorean vessel, because it is usually light in weight, tends to be extremely responsive to its helm or helms, this permitting such obstacles to be avoided on shorter notice than would be possible with a heavier more sluggish vessel; too, Gorean vessels, except when manned by those of Torvaldsland and the northern islands, usually beach at night; thus, when visibility is
