This was to have been an essay from an igloo, describing the awful privations of the writer and the primitive savagery of his surroundings on the Murman coast.  It was to have wrung the sympathetic heart of the public and at the same time to have enthralled the student of barbaric life with its wealth of exotic detail.  While embodying all the best-known newspaper cliches appropriated to these latitudes it was to have included others specially and laboriously prepared after a fascinating study of Arctic literature.

But circumstances have blighted its early inspiration, and the article it was to have been will never be written, the telling word-pictures designed on board the transport never executed.

Figure the disgust of five adventurers who, landing at the Murman base, sternly braced to encounter the last extremity of peril and of hardship, to sleep in the snow and dig one another out o’ mornings, to give the weakest of their number the warmest icicle to suck, the longest candle to chew—­found themselves billeted in a room which the landladies of home would delight to advertise!  Its walls were hung with such pictures as give cheap lodgings half their horror; it was encumbered with countless frail chairs and “kiggly” tables, and upon every flat surface had settled a swarm of albums, framed photographs, china dogs, wax flowers, penholder-stands, and all the choicest by-products of civilization struggling towards culture.  As we were not to be frozen by exposure or immediately attacked by Bolshies, we might reasonably have expected to be asphyxiated by the Russian stove; but even this consolation was denied us, since Madame, convinced that the English are mad in their love of fresh air, consented to leave it unlit.

When first we arrived, five large soldiers with five large kits, the aspect of the room filled us with terror.  The fiercest frost or foe we could have faced, but the bravest man may quail before wax-flowers and fragile tables top-heavy with ornaments and knick-knacks, and all felt that to encounter such things within the Arctic Circle was an unfair test of our fortitude.  Why had not the War Office or some newspaper correspondent warned us?

Madame, however, proved to have a sense of proportion or humour; or perhaps the collection was not her own.  In any case she showed no reluctance to displace family photographs or china dogs, and rapidly had the room cleared for action; so that now, when we roll about the floor in friendly struggle, it is only someone’s toilet tackle that crashes with its spidery table, instead of cherished artificial fauna and flora.

Thanks to our serviceable and becoming Arctic kit and the steady approach of the Spring thaw, heralded by the preparation of spare bridges to replace the existing ones, we can defy the eccentricities of the climate.  Even the language begins to reveal what might be termed hand-holds; though possibly, when the natives echo our words of greeting, painfully acquired from textbooks on Russian, they are simply imitating the sounds we make under the impression that they are learning a little English.