210 
FATE OF THE ESQUIMAUX. 
the water-torrents begin to freeze in the fiords and 
thawing ceases except at noonday. This terminates 
when the young ice has formed in a permanent layer 
on the bays, and winter returns with its long reign of 
cold and darkness. 
It is with a feeling of melancholy that I recall these 
familiar names. They illustrate the trials and modes 
of life of a simple-minded people, for whom it seems to 
be decreed that the year must very soon cease to renew 
its changes. It pains me when I think of their ap¬ 
proaching destiny,—in the region of night and winter, 
where the earth yields no fruit and the waters are 
locked,—without the resorts of skill or even the rude 
materials of art, and walled in from the world by 
barriers of ice without an outlet. 
If you point to the east, inland, where the herds of 
reindeer run over the barren hills unmolested,—for 
they have no means of capturing them,—they will cry 
“ Sermik,” “glacierand, question them as you may 
about the range of their nation to the north and south, 
the answer is still the same, with a shake of the head, 
“ Sermik, sermik-soak,” “ the great ice-wallthere is 
no more beyond. 
They have no “kresuk,” no wood. The drift-timber 
which blesses their more southern brethren never 
reaches them. The bow and arrow are therefore un¬ 
known ; and the kayak, the national implement of the 
Greenlander, which, like the palm-tree to the natives 
of the tropics, ministers to almost every want, exists 
among them only as a legendary word. 
