LAPONIES 1938 – Solstice in Lapland / Skiers of the night - Marc Augier (Saint-Loup)

With his comrade Édouard de Thuisy, Marc Augier undertook a 300 km ski expedition across Finnish Lapland in December 1938. In the vicinity of 70° North latitude, people live fiercely. The days are as fleeting as they are ghostly and the two companions advance through a complete night. Each of them carrying a rucksack, pulling together a traditional sled, they sympathize with the Sami nomads. The physical homeland of these men of the big tent is this cold desert, this unlimited space where reindeer graze and the northern lights hatch.

Talented novelist of the human as well as the superhuman, Marc Augier highlights with his pen and his skis the small as well as the great servitudes, the sufferings and the joys, the details which aroused his attention.

Here are brought together for the first time, the story Solstice in Lapland, published in 1940, and its revised version matured by the storms of History, which the author entitled in 1944 The Skiers of the Night .

Airplane pilot, biker, skier and mountaineer, champion of all “leisure activities of conquest”, Marc Augier (1908-1990) immediately places his work under the sign of the North and the cold. These inaugural stories pose the first and eternal questions: those of commitment, challenge and nature.

The work is richly illustrated with little-known photos published in magazines of the time.

Format: 12.5 x 19cm, 292 pages.