"To Build a Fire" (1908) is actually the second version of a story written in late 1901. In both versions, a lone white man in the Northland fights a losing battle against the cold that is coming over his body. London unquestionably turned the spirited but naive survival story of 1901 into a fascinating journey through the harrowed consciousness of a lonely man. In "Lost Face" (1908), a white man faces death at the hands of offended natives of the Northland, and their confrontation seems to partake of the frown and sarcasm of the frozen land. In "Koolau the Leper" (1909), not only do Hawaiian natives, gathered on the cliff-hemmed tip of an island, resist assaults by the white man, but they must also struggle against their own internal dislocation: leprosy, brought into the islands by white merchants and planters, is gradually deforming them. All these men fight not only for their lives, but beyond their lives for the ultimate survival of their dignity. Thus these men, though sometimes giving up the hope of life, seem indissolubly linked with the rest of mankind, and strike the reader, now as in the late 1900s, as if they were standing close by and whispering eternal truths about ourselves.