It was a picturesque sight that presented itself to the eyes of our travellers.
“All about the ledges of the rocks,” writes Nansen, “stood long rows of strangely wild, shaggy looking creatures, men, women and children—all dressed in much the same scanty attire, staring and pointing at us, and uttering the same cowlike sound we had heard in the forenoon. It was just as if a whole herd of cows were lowing one against another, as when the cowhouse door is opened in the morning to admit the expected fodder.”
They were all smiling,—a smile indeed, is the only welcoming salute of the Esquimaux,—all eager to help Nansen and his companions ashore, chattering away incessantly in their own tongue, like a saucepan boiling and bubbling over with words, not one of which, alas, could Nansen or his companions understand.
Presently Nansen was invited to enter one of their tents, in which was an odor of such a remarkable nature, such a blending of several ingredients, that a description thereof is impossible. It was the smell, as it were, of a mixture of train-oil, human exhalations, and the effluvium of fetid liquids all intimately mixed up together; while men and women, lying on the floor round the fire, children rolling about everywhere, dogs sniffing all around, helped to make up a scene that was decidedly unique.
East Greenland Esquimaux.
All of the occupants were of a brownish-greyish hue, due mostly to the non-application of soap and water, and were swarming with vermin. All of them were shiny with train-oil, plump, laughing, chattering creatures—in a word, presenting a picture of primitive social life, in all its original blessedness.
Nansen does not consider the Esquimaux, crosseyed and flat-featured though they be, as by any means repulsive looking. The nose he describes, in the case of children, “as a depression in the middle of the face,” the reverse ideal, indeed, of a European nose.
On the whole he considers their plump, rounded forms to have a genial appearance about them, and that the seal is the Esquimau prototype.
The hospitality of these children of nature was boundless. They would give away all they possessed, even to the shirt on their backs, had they possessed such an article; and certainly showed extreme gratitude when their liberality was reciprocated, evidently placing a high value on empty biscuit-tins, for each time any of them got one presented to him he would at once bellow forth his joy at the gift.