The work was now fairly under way.  Of the energy and the hardships it entailed, even we in our day that have heard so much of Arctic exploration can have but a faint conception.  Shut in on the coast of eternal ice and silence,—­silence, save when in summer the Arctic rivers were alive, and crash after crash announced that the glaciers coming down from the inland mountains were “casting their calves,” the great icebergs, upon the ocean,—­the colonists counted the days from the one when that year’s ship was lost to sight till the returning spring brought the next one, their only communication with their far-off home.  In summer the days were sometimes burning hot, but the nights always bitterly cold.  In winter, says Egede, hot water spilled on the table froze as it ran, and the meat they cooked was often frozen at the bone when set on the table.  Summer and winter Egede was on his travels between Sundays, sometimes in the trader’s boat, more often the only white man with one or two Eskimo companions, seeking out the people.  When night surprised him with no native hut in sight, he pulled the boat on some desert shore and, commending his soul to God, slept under it.  Once he and his son found an empty hut, and slept there in the darkness.  Not until day came again did they know that they had made their bed on the frozen bodies of dead men who had once been the occupants of the house, and had died they never knew how.  Peril was everywhere.  Again and again his little craft was wrecked.  Once the house blew down over their heads in one of the dreadful winter storms that ravage those high latitudes.  Often he had to sit on the rail of his boat, and let his numbed feet hang into the sea to restore feeling in them.  On land he sometimes waded waist-deep in snow, climbed mountains and slid down into valleys, having but the haziest notion of where he would land.  At home his brave wife sat alone, praying for his safety and listening to every sound that might herald his return.  Tremble and doubt they did, Egede owns, but they never flinched.  Their work was before them, and neither thought of turning back.

The Eskimos soon came to know that Egede was their friend.  When his boat entered a fjord where they were fishing, and his rowers shouted out that the good priest had come who had news of God, they dropped their work and flocked out to meet him.  Then he spoke to a floating congregation, simply as if they were children, and, as with Him whose message he bore, “the people heard him gladly.”  They took him to their sick, and asked him to breathe upon them, which he did to humor them, until he found out that it was an Angekok practice, whereupon he refused.  Once, after he had spoken of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, they took him to a new-made grave and asked him, too, to bring back their dead.  They brought him a blind man to be healed.  Egede looked upon them in sorrowful pity.  “I can do nothing,” he said; “but if he believes in Jesus, He has the power and can do it.”