was crowned with green grasses and starry flowers.  Men hunted game, women laughed for joy; they beat drums, they danced, they sang.  By the eternal, unrequited passion of the lovers in the skies, happiness and plenty came upon the earth.  But, with Light, came also Death.  Jealous of men’s happiness, Perdlugssuaq, the Great Evil, brought sickness; he struck men on the hunt, on the seas, in the mountains.  He was ever feared.  He made the Great Dark terrible.  But when the night became bright with the love-lorn glamour of the moon, Perdlugssuaq was for the time forgotten; in their hearts men felt a vague, tender, and ineffable stirring—­the lure of a passion stronger and stranger even than death.  They gazed upon the moon with instinctive, undefined pity.  So, as the years passed, and ages melted and remade the snows, the long day was golden with the Beauty that is ever desired, the Ideal never attained; the night was softly silver with the melancholy and eternal hope of the deathless love that eternally desires, eternally pursues, and is eternally denied.

Thus runs the Eskimo legend.

I

“Her cheeks were flushed delicately with the soft pink of the lichen flowers that bloom in the rare days of early summer.  Her eyes played with a light as elusive, as quick as the golden radiance on the seas.”

Great excitement prevailed among the members of the tribe.  Along a mottled green-and-brown stretch of shore, which rolled undulatingly toward the icy fringe of the polar sea, more than twoscore hunters were engaged in unusual activity.  Some were lacing tight over the framework the taut skin of their kayaks.  Others sharpened harpoon points with bits of flint.  Tateraq busily cut long lashings from tanned walrus hides.  Maisanguaq deftly took these and pieced them together into long lines, which were rolled in coils lasso-fashion.  Arnaluk and a half dozen others sat on their haunches, between their knees great balls made of the entire hides of seals.  With cheeks extended they blew into these with gusto.  Filled with air, the hides became floats, which were attached to the leather lasso lines.  The lines in turn were fastened by Attalaq and Papik to harpoons, which were to be driven into the walrus, the natives’ chief prey of the arctic sea.

A babel of conversation swayed to and fro among this northernmost fringe of the human race.  Now and then it was drowned in the raucous, deafening shriek of auks which swarmed from nearby cliffs and soared in clouds over the shore.

“Aveq soah!  Walrus!  Walrus!” shouted Papik, tossing up his arms and dancing, his brown face twisting with grotesque grimaces of joy.

“Aveq soah!  Aveq soah!” He leaped in frenzy.  He seized his harpoon in mimicry of striking, and darted it up and down in the air.  “Walrus!  Walrus!” he cried, and his feverish contagion spread through the crowd.