e and paint that wonderful country. Travelers would write that
the Arctic nights were magnificent; but I wanted to give the colors
and lights themselves."

_Borissoff Becomes a Samoyed_

Borissoff shipped on a Russian boat from Newcastle for the Murman
Coast--Russian territory adjoining Norway--and from there sailed to
Nova Zembla. On the frozen island of the Arctic Sea, living among the
wandering Samoyed tribes, he began to paint under such conditions as
certainly no artist has ever painted before. It was the make-shift
expedition of a buoyantly adventurous and rough-bred young artist,
better furnished with canvases and brushes than with clothing,
instruments, and stores. He practically became a Samoyed; he adapted
himself to the tribal laws with good-natured tact, helping out the
native commissariat by shooting white partridges, wild geese, and
Arctic bear. He studied reindeer breeding; he took native baths in
steam-tents and ice-water; he attended weddings, funerals, and pagan
rites. Wherever the tribe traveled, he followed; and everywhere he
painted.

The movements of the Samoyed depend largely on the habits of the
reindeer. "In autumn the reindeer seeks the wooded zone," says
Borissoff. "He cannot stand the tremendous snowstorms that whirl in
the tundra; and he must live on lichen from the trunks and boughs of
fir-trees, or feed on the shoots of birch and willows, when the frozen
soil prevents him from browsing moss under the snow. But no sooner
does he sniff the polar spring, than he longs irresistibly to gallop
to the north to the open air of the Arctic, where there are no
tiresome gnats, no intolerable wasps to lay their larvae in his skin
and cause him torment."

The Samoyed keeps in this migrating animal's wake; and it was in one
of these migrations north that Borissoff first saw what he calls the
Realms of Death.

_Painting in a Temperature of 30 deg. Below Zero_

"The curious thing was that I found all as I had imagined it," he
says. "The knowledge of the icebergs and the snow seemed to have been
born in me. Vast stretches of glaciers with their yawning chasms of
death, icebergs mountain-high--I greeted them as old friends. Living
on native rations and enduring the most bitter cold, I made
landscapes--or rather, icescapes--in the open, with a temperature of
30 degrees below zero.

"Sometimes it was impossible to paint. Even the turpentine froze. The
paint congealed in lumps, whilst the hairs of