Food was not forgotten, you may be well sure, nor tobacco and knickknacks for the natives.
The journey was a long one, and many a halt had to be made on hill-tops, and even in the valleys beneath.
No one who has not travelled in a real Eskimo well-appointed dog-sleigh can have the faintest notion of the speed obtained on good snow.
To-day it seemed as if the drivers were bent upon making a record, and it was one that I would defy any motor-car to make over the same track. The dogs needed to rest now and then, to lie down and pant a little, and refresh themselves by gulping down mouthfuls of the pure snow that was within easy reach.
Then they were fit again once more.
Though it was but little past one o’clock p.m., the sun was already going down when the halt for luncheon was called; and it need hardly be said that under so bracing a sky our travellers made each a hearty meal.
They were high up on a rounded hill, and the view all around from the rugged mountains of the west to the east, where lay the rough and rugged sea of ice, was indescribably beautiful.
Even the Yak-Yaks themselves seemed impressed with the transcendent loveliness of this marvellous Arctic sunset, and those moments of such stillness and silence that one might have heard a snowflake fall.
It was night and starlight before they reached the Eskimo village.
A moon by this time had risen solemnly over the hills, and flooded all the country with its strange, mysterious light—- a light the like of which I have seen in no land save the Arctic, a light that seems mystic and positively holy.