FORTY THOUSAND AGAINST THE ARCTIC

men. It was months later that we discovered their bodies-
horrible to look at. They had starved to death, and were
frozen hard3 like glass.

'That journey was my Arctic baptism. In spite of the
horror I had seen, I fell in love deeply with the country,
and, after going on a four months5 holiday with my wife, I
decided that I would take up work in the Arctic for good.
I learned to speak the native languages of the Samoyed
and the Ostyak tribes and founded a newspaper in the
Nyentze (that is Samoyed) language. It was printed at
Obdorsk and called Hyarnaya Hyerm> which means "The
Red North". I studied the life of the natives, always with
one aim in mind: to help to rebuild their national existence
with all its positive elements—their unique abilities to live
and produce in the Polar regions—while giving them at the
same time as much of our technical, social, scientific achieve-
ments as would prove useful to them.

4I broke off all contact with Russians, including my
own family, and went into the tundra alone for nine months.
I travelled with a tribe throughout the winter. I wrote
down their songs and legends, learned to drive dog teams,
showed them how to heal scurvy, tried to fight shamanism
which was still keeping these peoples in the spell of supersti-
tion and fear. Once I met a tribe who did not know that the
Tsar was dead. Their prince was well aware of the fact,
but hid the news from his subjects; his threat of fighting them
with the help of his mighty white ally kept them in fear,
and they obeyed his orders. There I organized a little
revolution to free them from the grip of their evil ruler,
and helped them to dispose of their own miniature
Tsar.

'Gradually I introduced the Red law into the tundra. I
had taken dozens of toothbrushes and packets of soap with
me. In the end I had only my own left. But a man who had

seen my friends using them asked me for it—he wanted

to convert his own tribe to this habit of keeping clean and

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