He had spent all day ashore among them, in various repairs to their bodies, and he had promised to come back to them in the morning.
"They're a nice, jolly, friendly lot," he said. "So different from the old days, before the Moravian missionaries came.
"You know, they always called themselves 'Innuits.' That means 'the people.' They said God went on making human beings till He made the Eskimo. When He saw them, He was perfectly satisfied, and didn't make any more.
"But the early Norsemen came along, about a thousand years after the time of Christ, and called them 'skrellings.' That means 'weaklings.' It was the Indians who called them Eskimo. The word means 'eaters of raw meat.'"
"They've sure got some funny ideas about Hell 'n' the Devil, Doctor!" put in an old, wise sailor who was sitting deep in the shadows.
"Yes they have!" agreed the Doctor. "Their God, Tongarsuk, is a good spirit. He rules a lot of lesser spirits, called tongaks, and they run and tell the priests, who are called angekoks, what to do. The angekoks are the medicine-men and the weather-prophets. The Devil isn't he, but she. And she is so dreadful that she hasn't any name, because you're not supposed to talk about her at all.
"The angekoks are awfully busy fellows. They have to keep making journeys to the centre of the earth, the Eskimos believe. Because that's where Tongarsuk the good spirit is, and they have to go and ask him what to do when the little spirits get lazy and won't tell them.
"Anybody who thinks the angekok has an easy time of it on his voyage is mistaken. The journey has to be in winter. It must be at midnight. The angekok's body is standing alone in the hut—his head tied between his legs, his arms bound behind his back. In the meantime his soul has left the body, and is on the way to heaven or hell.
"That's what an ordinary, every-day angekok has to do. But if you want to become an angekok poglit, which is a fat priest (meaning a chief priest), it hurts a lot more, and takes much more time and trouble. Then you have to let a white bear take your wandering soul and drag it down to the sea by one toe. They don't tell you how a soul comes to have a toe to drag it by.
"When the soul reaches the seaboard, it must be swallowed by a sea-lion—and of course the soul may have to sit there in the cold for quite a while waiting for a sea-lion to come along. After the sea-lion has swallowed it, the same white bear must reappear and swallow it too. Then the white bear must give up the spirit, and let it return to the dark house where the body is waiting for it. All this time the neighbors keep up an infernal racket with a drum and any other musical instruments they may happen to have.