The It Is Written team has just returned from one of the most forbidding climates on earth—the Arctic—a vast desert of white that was named, strangely enough, by the Greeks. They called it Arktikos, which is not a reference to the cold, but rather to its position on the globe. To the ancient Greeks, it was the land to the north, directly under the constellation of Ursa Major, the great bear. It was the North Star, Polaris, that tied the massive cosmic bear to the lands that occupied the top of the globe. Arktikos was the land of the great bear.
