Where to Find Hippos at the North Pole

 SPOILERS: The answer's underground, and in bits, because fifty million years or so ago the Arctic was a swamp! Did elephants have antlers back then, as imagined in this engraving? Who knows? I mean, absolutely not, according to the fossil record, but unweildy tusks and supernumerary knobbly bits were abundant in the methane-rich Eocene. Also, more recent, scientifically verifiable visualisations of the epoch show a planet ruled by giant parrots, so let's not rule anything out.

 I couldn't find any attribution for the engraving, but it looks as if it might come from a children's book published in 1887 by Henry Davenport Northrop, called Earth, Sea, and the Sky (I wonder if Ursula K. Le Guin had a copy). Illustrations from it are all over the internet, and well worth seeking out. Here, for example, is a Megalosaurus where they sort of get the head right...

 Speaking of windows on the world, the reason I know the Arctic used to be a swamp is because it's one of the many things I learnt playing around with PBS' Nova Polar Lab, as recommended by Sarah Airress after her own trip to McMurdo in Antarctica. The brilliantly engaging, slightly glitchy interactive website takes you round the globe, to visit actual field scientists in their often extraordinary research stations – like David Holland's here, on the Jakobshavn Glacier, which sank the Titanic –

– and then dig up fossils, bore down miles into ice sheets, or send seals out to measure the water temperature, to learn, first hand, the history of this planet, and the stark reality of the sharp change in its climate. You can find it HERE. I really recommend it. It is probably for children.

 

You get to visit McMurdo too.

Shadow-Unboxing (or: Why I'm totally fine with the map of Earthsea)

"To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. 

Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven." 

                                                                                                                 Chang Tzu

 Try telling that to Dangermouse.

 And still on the subject of maps...

 This is the ball-ache that greets any reader opening Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea". For much of the book, it appears to be an example of exactly the kind of map-at-the-beginning-of-a-book I talked about dreading in yesterday's post – the kind you're meant to constantly refer back to while following the hero's journey, an impediment to reading, crammed with unnecessary detail, imprisoning upon the page a world which the act of reading is supposed to liberate. But Le Guin's brilliant, and clearly knew what she was doing, because SPOILERS! the book's climax takes place off the map. It's only beyond the edge of the world that Ged can name his shadow, and – like Dangermouse in "Custard" – let reality catch up with him. The map isn't here to show us where the hero went, but to show us, physically in fact, what he had to escape. It's an excellent way of depicting magic. I'm guessing. I'm very glad I re-read it.

  

When does this happen in the book though? 

I still do not remember this happening in the book.

 "Every story must make its own rules. And obey them." I was inspired to read more Le Guin because of an excellent documentary no longer available on iplayer but still viewable here. And I haven't read any of the other Earthsea books yet. Nor worked out what the point of the map at the beginning of "The Dispossessed" was either so, you know, maybe I'm wrong and she just liked maps.

 One other takeaway – Character after character offers to tell Ged the name of his shadow and save him his journey, but it's clear he's meant to turn them down, get lost, and work it out for himself, which – taken with what I remember of "The Lathe of Heaven" – leads me to ask: Does anyone know if Ursula K. Le Guin had a beef with therapy?