Books: A Sahara of Ice

THE LAST KINGS OF THULE by Jean Malaurie Translated by Adrienne Foulke Button; 489 pages; $25.75

In 1818, British Explorer John Ross arrived in Greenland and gave Arctic nomads their first good look at a qallunaaq, a "big eyebrows." In turn, Ross and his seamen gazed on squat Asians wearing bearskin pants. Outsiders called them Eskimos, a derivation from the derogatory Cree Indian word meaning "eaters of raw meat." They simply called themselves Inuit, human beings, a distinction born not of racial arrogance, but of fact. For centuries, the only other walking mammals that most polar natives met used four legs or flippers. The Inuit were built like nature's thermos bottles, with short arms and legs, and small hands and feet that conserved heat stoked in barrel-like torsos. They ate seal meat and blubber, wiped the grease from their lips with partridge wings and talked mostly of hunting and sled dogs.

It was a classic encounter. Restless, acquisitive men of iron, canvas and hemp confronted a communal society of bone, skins and thong. The outcome, too, was familiar. Skilled at catching birds in nets, the Inuit themselves were about to be scooped up in the cash nexus. A hitherto unknown clock was imposed on the culture, and its days were numbered.

Jean Malaurie, director of the French Center for Arctic Studies, sets the alarm for 1951, when the U.S., with the permission of the Danish government, began construction of an Air Force base at Thule. It was also the year that Malaurie completed months of darkness and months of light living among the vanishing "Hyperboreans," the name ancient Greeks gave to a mythic northern race. The author prefers "Polar Eskimo," and estimates that there are about 100,000 of them: 39,000 in Greenland, 35,000 in Alaska, 23,000 in Canada and 1,600 in the Chukotski region of Siberia.

Officially, Malaurie entered Greenland's Sahara of ice and snow as a geologist. But land formations could not rival the relationships he shaped with his hosts. His life was in their hands, and, though they did not know it, their immortality was in his cold fingers. Whenever necessary, he would remove his mittens to record minute details of traditional life. "It is the search for time newly refound that I offer the reader," says Malaurie. The result, The Last Kings of Thule, is a poignant, endlessly informative valedictory that relives a great Arctic adventure in the tradition of Peary, Cook and Rasmussen.

Except for his proud Gallic nose, the author blends in. He dresses in native furs, cracks the whip expertly over his sled team, and gnaws blubbery popsicles in the glow of an igloo oil lamp. He falls into the rhythms of polar life and begins to view this white-on-white world through the eyes of an Inuit.

Malaurie is treated hospitably but not coddled. His hosts are communists, not liberals. The wind-chill factors of their lives dictate stern lessons and harsh measures. The aged are no longer left to die, but there are no discounts for senior citizens. Orphans go to the bottom of the social ladder, and the A.S.P.C.A. would not be pleased to learn that some polar dog-owners toughen their animals with hunger and the club.