This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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Perhaps my favorite story in E. Nesbit’s Book of Dragons is “The Ice Dragon, or Do as You’re Told.” George and Jane defy their parents by walking out of their English backyard in search of the North Pole. They cross one lawn, then two, and then find the Arctic, complete with a giant ice slide for convenient travel, evil dwarves made out of sealskin, and a giant dragon curled around the North Pole itself. And what does the North Pole look like? Well, as Nesbit explains, “You will hear grown-up people talk a great deal of nonsense about the North Pole, and when you are grown up, it is even possible that you may talk nonsense about it yourself (the most unlikely things do happen) but deep down in your heart you must always remember that the North Pole is made of clear ice, and could not possibly, if you come to think of it, be made of anything else.”
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