“I do believe,” shouted the blind man:  “let Him heal me.”  It occurred to Egede, perhaps as a mere effort at cleanliness, to wash his eyes in cognac, and he sent him away with words of comfort.  He did not see his patient again for thirteen years.  Then he was in a crowd of Eskimos who came to Godthaab.  The man saw as well as Egede.

“Do you remember?” he said, “you washed my eyes with sharp water, and the Son of God in whom I believed, He made me to see.”

Children the Eskimos were in their idolatry, and children they remained as Christians.  By Egede’s prayers they set great store.  “You ask for us,” they told him.  “God does not hear us; He does not understand Eskimo.”  Of God they spoke as “Him up there.”  They believed that the souls of the dead went up on the rainbow, and, reaching the moon that night, rested there in the moon’s house, on a bench covered with the white skins of young polar bears.  There they danced and played games, and the northern lights were the young people playing ball.  Afterward they lived in houses on the shore of a big lake overshadowed by a snow mountain.  When the waters ran over the edge of the lake, it rained on earth.  When the “moon was dark,” it was down on earth catching seal for a living.  Thunder was caused by two old women shaking a dried sealskin between them; the lightning came when they turned the white side out.  The “Big Nail” we have heard of as the Eskimos’ Pole, was a high-pointed mountain in the Farthest North on which the sky rested and turned around with the sun, moon, and stars.  Up there the stars were much bigger.  Orion’s Belt was so near that you had to carry a whip to drive him away.

The women were slaves.  An Eskimo might have as many wives as he saw fit; they were his, and it was nobody’s business.  But adultery was unknown.  The seventh commandment in Egede’s translation came to read, “One wife alone you shall have and love.”  The birth of a girl was greeted with wailing.  When grown, she was often wooed by violence.  If she fled from her admirer, he cut her feet when he overtook her, so that she could run no more.  The old women were denounced as witches who drove the seals away, and were murdered.  An Eskimo who was going on a reindeer hunt, and found his aged mother a burden, took her away and laid her in an open grave.  Returning on the third day, he heard her groaning yet, and smothered her with a big stone.  He tried to justify himself to Egede by saying that “she died hard, and it was a pity not to speed her.”  Yet they buried a dog’s head with a child, so that the dog, being clever, could run ahead and guide the little one’s steps to heaven.