18 HUNTING WITH THE ESKIMOS 



and I busied ourselves putting our whale-boat in good 

 condition. We calked and painted it, and I planed 

 down the stick obtained at Turnavik, fashioning it 

 into a boom which we fitted. 



On July 27th a heavy fog, which had attended us 

 for several hours, lifted, and lo ! there lay Greenland, 

 her high, rugged coast line topped with snow, with 

 here and there a glimpse of her interior ice cap. 



No night came now. We were in the latitude of 

 continuous day, and presently the sun made his circle 

 without once in the twenty- four hours dipping below 

 the horizon. How weird and uncanny it was! On 

 the twenty-eighth we crossed the magic circle and 

 were at last literally within the charmed area of the 

 Arctic. 



Two schools of whales were passed. I counted 

 eight of the monsters blowing at one time, in one of 

 the schools. The other school was very large. One 

 of the whales blew within thirty yards of the Erik. 

 We all ran for our rifles to get a shot at him when he 

 rose again, but when he did he was out of range. 



Hundreds of water fowl circled about, or dotted 

 the sea, many of them feeding on the oily matter that 

 dripped from the whale meat on the Erik's deck. 



Presently we were running along the Disco Island 

 coast, which lay about six miles off our starboard. 

 Most of the coast appeared to be over two thousand 

 feet high, and was covered with ice and snow, and in 

 a number of places the interior ice cap could be easily 

 discerned through our glasses. Disco Island, lying 

 off the southwest coast of Greenland, is about eighty- 



