without oil. Once a day Ah-king-ah brought them hope and comfort by lighting the stone lamp and chanting magical words to the Almighty Devil.
The missionary in his igloo spent desperate hours on his knees pleading with his God to change the wind. In the darkness he paced his room, warming his thin body by the exercise and striving for courage by repeating over and over the promises of the Bible. Sternly he reduced the rations for his scant daily meal until hunger brought upon him that strange fanatical exaltation which is akin to the ecstasy that causes the fasting prophet to prophesy, or the medicine-man to perform his greatest feats of magic. With the passage of each dreary day the conviction grew upon him that this unprecedented blizzard had been sent to test his zeal as a worker in the vineyard of the Lord. This blizzard was his opportunity to win an entire village from the heathen sway of the medicine-man. With every atom of his being he grew to believe that if once he could persuade the people to enter the meeting-house, if once he could induce them to pray to his God, the wind would die and the hunters be able to get food.
This conviction forced him every afternoon through the gale to the kashim. He ignored every rebuff, ignored utterly the danger to himself, although he knew that Ah-king-ah, should he forget the fate of the priest-murdering medicine-men, might have him killed as a witch who had brought misfortune on the village. Sometimes, by dint of superhuman self-denial, he brought bits of hard-tack for the strangely quiet little ones clinging to their mothers in the kashim. Always he pleaded with the elders to turn from shamanism to the true God. The Eskimos, apathetic from prolonged hunger, suffered his presence. While he was with them there was at least the light of his kerosene lantern. Otherwise the kashim was always in darkness now, for Ah-king-ah's oil was gone.
Construing this tolerance as an encouraging sign, the earnest little man brought his Bible; and, standing under the swinging light of the lantern, he translated page after page of Exodus—the promises of the Lord to the children of Israel; the feeding of the wanderers in the desert. But the Eskimos sat stolid, unmoved, apathetic. Even his ardent rendering of the miracle of the loaves and fishes fell flat. Ah-king-ah, as if in weary scorn of his rival, stretched himself on the skins of his shelf and slept—or appeared to sleep.
One day, by accident, the missionary read of the magicians and sorcerers who competed with Moses and Aaron at the Court of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Milli-ru-ak raised his eyes from a sad contemplation of his ailing infant son asleep in its mother's arms. Miak, the witch-woman, leaned forward over her empty lamp to listen. A stir of interest went among the people. Here at last was something they could understand.
The white man had heretofore preached only a kind and beneficent God, but seeing in this an opening in the wall of their indifference, he plunged into detailed descriptions of the misfortunes that had visited the Egyptians. His gaunt face and sunken eyes glowed with fervour. Hunger lent a delirious and terrible vividness to his speech. Vicariously the starving Eskimos were drowned in his Biblical rivers of blood. They were tormented by plagues of frogs and boils, locusts and lice. They were terrified by hails and thunders. Aware of the Eskimos' almost idolatrous love for their offspring, he loosed his tongue of all restraint when he pictured the smiting of the firstborn. To the sound of the howling blizzard he dwelt long on the pathos of the dead childish faces in those desolate homes along the Nile. Ah-king-ah restirred himself and sat up. There was a murmuring among the hunters. The mothers caught their children to their breasts and swayed back and forth moaning.
The missionary, light-headed from hunger and emotion, reeled under the swinging shadows of the lantern. "Would ye, like the Egyptians, harden your hearts against the word of God and bring death to your children?" he shouted. "Oh, come, my friends! Come with me before your little ones lie dead in your arms! Pray to Almighty God and be delivered! Follow me before it is too late!" Carried away by the effect of his eloquence on the hitherto indifferent Eskimos, he caught at the lantern and lurched forward toward the exit of the kashim. "Follow me to the house of God!"
The mothers rose with hysterical cries. The hunters began to get down from their shelf. But before the missionary had reached the ladder Ah-king-ah was standing in the middle of the floor. Calm and dignified, he made a single motion with one hand. Not a soul followed the white man.
The next day when the missionary climbed to the opening of the kashim he found the hole covered. His knocks and pleas met with no response, because Ah-king-ah was sitting on the door to hold it down.
Night brought a drop in temperature and an increase in the force of the gale. The grinding and crash of the ice-pack seemed to threaten the very foundations of the island. With the exception of the missionary, every soul on In-ga-lee-nay was packed in the
