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Originally Posted by Icelander
I have obtained it. Thank you very much.
Even though I should either prepare tomorrow's session tonight or get an early night to do it before we start, I'm probably going to read it right now. I've wanted to do so for years.
Thanks.
And the rest of you, please allow suggestions to flow freely, because I'll definately have too little time to prepare before starting next session in the Between, before entering the mind of Ms. Delvano.
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Penguins usually come up in Antarctic adventures as sympathetic helpers and sources of comic relief, since they have all the sympathetic virtues and vices. Of course, this Dreamlands' penguins and the things which prey upon them may be a bit unusual ...
Maciej Ceglowki has an essay on what would have happened if they found gold in Antarctica in 1890
https://idlewords.com/2016/10/cape_adare.htm
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In that world, the start of the 20th century brought a gold rush unlike any other. Men who had failed to get rich at the Klondike or in Nome sailed halfway round the world to Lyttleton and Bluff in hopes of joining a crew. The already secretive sealers and whalers faced a hard choice—rent out their ships to the desperate, or slip off and try their luck with their own men. The whaling industry collapsed as every available ship headed for the Antarctic. For a few brief years, Lyttleton was the richest city in the world.
The first winter saw unspeakable scenes on the ice: parties left starving by relief ships that never came, frontier justice meted out to claim jumpers, petty quarrels that escalated to murder in the long months of darkness. Some of the men found too much gold for their own good, and disappeared in the Antarctic night.
Nature proved more pitiless than the miners. Entire tent camps were blown out to sea by the astonishing winter gales. Men in the same tent could not hear each other screaming. Many simply froze to death in the darkness.
In the autumn of 1903, the men at Cape Royds stood in silence and watched their cabins burn, knowing that it was the last time in their lives they would feel warm. Four of them were found the next spring, huddled in a snow cave and incoherent with hunger.
The second summer brought the discovery of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, where pieces of gold the size of a man's thumb lay out for the taking. Even after the fragile crust had been turned over with spades, and the ground no longer sparkled, new arrivals streamed in, stepping over the mummified bodies of men and mules that gave the place the look of a battlefield. ...
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