C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

In 1913 a school-friend of mine went with her father to San Franciscoand thence on a tourist steamer to Alaska. She sent me, from Skagway, a volumeof Robert Service's poems and a letter describing vast and desolate tracts ofmuskeg country.That letter and those poems haunted my daydreams for years. There werecertain lines that filled me with a yearning restlessness.I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollowThat's plumb-full of hush to the brim.I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods.Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on ....Big mountains heaved to heaven ...black mountains where the rapids rip and roar.And the wild is calling, calling ... let us go.As for my friend's letter, I lost it long ago but I never forgot her description ofthat wild and silent land.