The Giant of the North | Page 4

resemblance there is in sentiment
and modes of thought between different members of the human family.
This untutored savage, this Polar giant, replied, in the Eskimo tongue,
words which may be freely translated--"Never fear, mother, I know
how to take care of myself."
Had he been an Englishman, he could not have expressed himself more
naturally. He smiled as he looked down at his stout and genial mother,
while she stooped and drew forth a choice morsel of walrus flesh from
one of her boots. Eskimo ladies wear enormous sealskin boots the
whole length of their legs. The tops of these boots are made extremely
wide, for the purpose of stowing away blubber, or babies, or other odd
articles that might encumber their hands.
Chingatok seemed the personification of savage dignity as he stood
there, leaning on a short walrus spear. Evidently his little mother doted
on him. So did Oblooria, a pretty little girl of about sixteen, who was
his only sister, and the counterpart of her mother, hairy coat and tail
included, only a few sizes smaller.
But Chingatok's dignity was marred somewhat when he went down on
his hands and knees, in order to crawl through the low snow-tunnel
which was the only mode of egress from the snow-hut.
Emerging at the outer end of the tunnel, he stood up, drew the hood of
his sealskin coat over his head, shouldered his spear, and went off with
huge and rapid strides over the frozen billows of the Arctic Sea.
Spring was far advanced at the time of which we write, and the sun
shone not only with dazzling brilliancy, but with intense power on the
fields of ice which still held the ocean in their cold unyielding embrace.
The previous winter had been unusually severe, and the ice showed
little or no sign of breaking up, except at a great distance from land,

where the heaving of the waves had cracked it up into large fields.
These were gradually parting from the main body, and drifting away
with surface-currents to southern waters, there to be liquefied and
re-united to their parent sea.
The particular part of the Greenland coast to which the giant went in his
ramble is marked by tremendous cliffs descending perpendicularly into
the water. These, at one part, are divided by a valley tilled with a great
glacier, which flows from the mountains of the interior with a steep
declivity to the sea, into which it thrusts its tongue, or extreme end.
This mighty river of ice completely fills the valley from side to side,
being more than two miles in width and many hundred feet thick. It
seems as solid and motionless as the rocks that hem it in, nevertheless
the markings on the surface resemble the currents and eddies of a
stream which has been suddenly frozen in the act of flowing, and if you
were to watch it narrowly, day by day, and week by week, you would
perceive, by the changed position of objects on its surface, that it does
actually advance or flow towards the sea. A further proof of this
advance is, that although the tongue is constantly shedding off large
icebergs, it is never much decreased in extent, being pushed out
continuously by the ice which is behind. In fact, it is this pushing
process which causes the end of the tongue to shed its bergs, because,
when the point is thrust into deep water and floats, the motion of the
sea cracks the floating mass off from that pail which is still aground,
and lets it drift away.
Now it was to these ice-cliffs that the somewhat reckless giant betook
himself. Although not well acquainted with that region, or fully alive to
the extent of the danger incurred, his knowledge was sufficient to
render him cautious in the selection of the position which should form
his outlook.
And a magnificent sight indeed presented itself when he took his stand
among the glittering pinnacles. Far as the eye could reach, the sea lay
stretched in the sunshine, calm as a mill-pond, and sparkling with
ice-jewels of every shape and size. An Arctic haze, dry and sunny,
seemed to float over all like golden gauze. Not only was the sun

encircled by a beautiful halo, but also by those lovely lights of the
Arctic regions known as parhelia, or mock-suns. Four of these made no
mean display in emulation of their great original. On the horizon,
refraction caused the ice-floes and bergs to present endless variety of
fantastic forms, and in the immediate foreground--at the giant's feet--
tremendous precipices of ice went sheer down into the deep water,
while, away to the right, where a bay still retained its winter grasp of an
ice-field, could be seen, like white bee-hives,