The Arctic is the zone of the world where the sky touches the earth. Not everyone can endure the great light, not everyone the darkness, not everyone the great solitude. I had the great grace to be thrown right into the harshness of the wild nature at the very beginning of my adventure, and this alone, receiving my baptism of fire. In the icy Svalbard, many hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest settlement and without the technical aids of modern Arctic expeditions, Christiane Ritter and her husband fulfilled a dream: they lived together with a fur trapper in a primitive hut for a year in 1934. Christiane Ritter's account of her experiences gives a glimpse into the mysterious fascination of the Arctic.