The floe , as you will remember , had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till it was one frozen earthquake . There were gullies and ravines , and holes like gravel-pits , cut in ice ; lumps and scattered pieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe ; blotches of old black ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved up again ; roundish boulders of ice ; saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind ; and sunken pits where thirty or forty acres lay below the level of the rest of the field . From a little distance you might have taken the lumps for seal or walrus , overturned sleighs or men on a hunting expedition , or even the great Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself ; but in spite of these fantastic shapes , all on the very edge of starting into life , there was neither sound nor the least faint echo of sound . And through this silence and through this waste , where the sudden lights flapped and went out again , the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare -- a nightmare of the end of the world at the end of the world . When they were tired Kotuko would make what the hunters call a `` half-house , '' a very small snow hut , into which they would huddle with the travelling-lamp , and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat . When they had slept , the march began again -- thirty miles a day to get ten miles northward . The girl was always very silent , but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into songs he had learned in the Singing-House -- summer songs , and reindeer and salmon songs -- all horribly out of place at that season . He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him , and would run wildly up a hummock , tossing his arms and speaking in loud , threatening tones . To tell the truth , Kotuko was very nearly crazy for the time being ; but the girl was sure that he was being guided by his guardian spirit , and that everything would come right . She was not surprised , therefore , when at the end of the fourth march Kotuko , whose eyes were burning like fire-balls in his head , told her that his tornaq was following them across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog . The girl looked where Kotuko pointed , and something seemed to slip into a ravine . It was certainly not human , but everybody knew that the tornait preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal , and such like . It might have been the Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself , or it might have been anything , for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that their eyes were untrustworthy . They had trapped nothing , and seen no trace of game since they had left the village ; their food would not hold out for another week , and there was a gale coming . A Polar storm can blow for ten days without a break , and all that while it is certain death to be abroad . Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough to take in the hand-sleigh -LRB- never be separated from your meat -RRB- , and while he was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the key-stone of the roof , he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice half a mile away . The air was hazy , and the Thing seemed to be forty feet long and ten feet high , with twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered all along the outlines . The girl saw it too , but instead of crying aloud with terror , said quietly , `` That is Quiquern . What comes after ? '' `` He will speak to me , '' said Kotuko ; but the snow-knife trembled in his hand as he spoke , because however much a man may believe that he is a friend of strange and ugly spirits , he seldom likes to be taken quite at his word .
XXXXX , too , is the phantom of a gigantic toothless dog without any hair , who is supposed to live in the far North , and to wander about the country just before things are going to happen .
Quiquern Singing-House blotches day gravel-pits left seal-meat sleighs tornait travelling-lamp