ARRIVAL AT OKAK 



I think a great many people would have been 

 appalled at such a request as this, but we had a 

 practical man to deal with ; he simply called the 

 Eskimos together and set them to work, himself 

 toiling as hard as any. They fetched stones from 

 the beach and the hillside; they sent the women 

 and children with boxes and buckets, to carry sand 

 from the patch of sandbank that peeps up at low 

 water ; and so they built the foundation. 



I wondered, as I walked round the walls, how 

 the corner stones had ever been put in place. They 

 were enormous lumps of rock, and had been raised 

 fully five feet off the ground without the help of 

 any kind of machinery. In fact, the whole feat 

 of building the foundation surprised me, for the 

 beach is covered with ice for nine months of the 

 twelve, so that the pebble gathering and sand fetching 

 must have been accomplished at a marvellous rate 

 for the foundation to be made, and the hospital to 

 be built upon it, all in the space of one short season. 



I asked the missionary about those corner stones. 



For answer he smiled an inscrutable smile. " We 

 had to pull all together," he said. It appears that 

 they made a tripod of heavy tree-stems, slung a 

 pulley from the top, passed a thick rope over the 

 pulley and tied it to the stone, and then got hold 

 of the rope, and pulled all together ! It sounded 

 very simple, but I looked again at those corner stones 

 and wished I had been there to see the pulling. 



I understood it better during the afternoon, for 

 a strong wind began to blow, and the oarsmen were 

 unable to row the lighters ashore. The work of 

 unloading threatened to come to a stop, and the 

 captain dared not delay with the Labrador winter 



52 



