When I am lost like this, I turn to my touchstone, my north, my orion, my hope.
I am north, Arkhangel'sk, the gate to the north, Svalbard, I have made her mine own.



"Ask where's the North? At York, 'tis on the Tweed;
In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,
At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where." -Pope, An Essay on Man

"Zembla, a distant northern land." -Nabokov, Pale Fire

"The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears." -Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

'The manuscript fell into the hands of a person who
is known to have a deranged mind' -Nabokov, Pale Fire

"Oh had I rather unadmired remained
In some lone isle, or distant Northern land." -Pope, Rape of the Lock

'That crystal land'
'my dear country'
'Stilettos of a frozen stillicide'
'that the poet and his commentator first met on a winter day' -Nabokov, Pale Fire

"All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens-in Zemblan!" -Nabokov, Pale Fire

'I felt sure at last that he would recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla burning in my brain'
'he was reassembling my Zembla!'
'how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt about the King of Zembla-
Oh, but I cannot express the agony!'
'everything connected with the magnificent Zemblan theme with which I kept furnishing him' -Nabokov, Pale Fire

"There motley Images her fancy strike,
Figures ill-pair'd, and Similes unlike.
She sees a mob of metaphors advance,...
Here gay Description AEgypt glads with showers;
Or gives Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers;
Glitt'ring with ice here hoary hills are seen,
There painted valleys of eternal green,
On cold December fragrant chaplets blow,
And heavy harvests nod beneath the snow." -Pope, The Dunciad

"... and now I plough
Old Zembla's fields where my gray stubble grows." Nabokov, Pale Fire

"So this is all treacherous old Shade could say about Zembla-my Zembla?" Nabokov,Pale Fire

"When I was traveling north to Bolvangar with the gyptians, the child Lyra told me about something that happened in the college she used to live in, back in Oxford. Lord Asriel had shown the other scholars the severed head of a man called Stanislaus Grumman, and that kinda persuaded them to give him some money to come north and find out what had happened.

"Now, the child was so sure of what she'd seen that I didn't like to question her too much. But what she said made a kind of memory come to my mind, except that I couldn't reach it clearly. I knew something about this Dr. Grumman. And it was only on the flight here from Svalbard that I remembered what it was. It was an old hunter from Tungusk who told me. It seems that Grumman knew the whereabouts of some kind of object that gives protection to whoever holds it. I don't want to belittle the magic that you witches can command, but this thing, whatever it is, has a kind of power that outclasses anything I've ever heard of.

"And I thought I might postpone my retirement to Texas because of my concern for that child, and search for Dr. Grumman. You see, I don't think he's dead. I think Lord Asriel was fooling those scholars.

"So I'm going to Nova Zembla, where I last heard of him alive, and I'm going to search for him. I cain't see the future, but I can see the present clear enough. And I'm with you in this war, for what my bullets are worth. But that's the task I'm going to take on, ma'am," he concluded, turning back to Serafina Pekkala. "I'm going to seek out Stanislaus Grumman and find out what he knows, and if I can find that object he knows of, I'll take it to Lyra." -Pullman, The Subtle Knife