Then the angekok , the village sorcerer , came in , and Kotuko told him the tale a second time . It lost nothing in the telling . `` Follow the tornait -LSB- the spirits of the stones -RSB- , and they will bring us food again , '' said the angekok . Now the girl from the North had been lying near the lamp , eating very little and saying less for days past ; but when Amoraq and Kadlu next morning packed and lashed a little hand-sleigh for Kotuko , and loaded it with his hunting-gear and as much blubber and frozen seal-meat as they could spare , she took the pulling-rope , and stepped out boldly at the boy 's side . `` Your house is my house , '' she said , as the little bone-shod sleigh squeaked and bumped behind them in the awful Arctic night . `` My house is your house , '' said Kotuko ; `` but I think that we shall both go to Sedna together . '' Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld , and the Inuit believe that every one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country before going to Quadliparmiut , the Happy Place , where it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up when you call . Through the village people were shouting : `` The tornait have spoken to Kotuko . They will show him open ice . He will bring us the seal again ! '' Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold , empty dark , and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on the pulling-rope or humoured the sleigh through the ice in the direction of the Polar Sea . Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go north , and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer -- those stars that we call the Great Bear . No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-rubbish and the sharp-edged drifts ; but those two knew exactly the turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock , the jerk that nearly lifts it out of an ice-crack , and the exact strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of the spear-head that make a path possible when everything looks hopeless . The girl said nothing , but bowed her head , and the long wolverine-fur fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad , dark face . The sky above them was an intense velvety black , changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon , where the great stars burned like street-lamps . From time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens , flick like a flag , and disappear ; or a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness , trailing a shower of sparks behind . Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colours -- red , copper , and bluish ; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten gray . 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 XXXXX 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 .
European Inuit Lights Place Quadliparmiut ermine night sleigh spear-head year