It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest spectaculars of our whole six months’ journeying,—­the Ramparts.  The great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred feet high.  Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers, and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, “turned on edge,” flows, maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour.  The depth of the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls.  In spring, the ice jams the stupendous current.  The dammed-up water once lifted a skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the cliffs above.

As we pass in silence we can but look and feel.  One day a Canadian artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic.  Awed and uplifted, our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of this Arctic night repays the whole summer’s travel.  The setting of the picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and envelopes the earth as with a garment,—­the light that never was on sea or land.  We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to pass the portal into the Arctic World.

[Illustration:  Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth]

A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians has found foothold at the base of the escarpment.  They have been waiting for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their old-fashioned rifles.  The sound reverberates from rock to rock, ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower down.  They repeat the salute, and others take it up.  Signals are flashed from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river; and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.

The Arctic Circle!  When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say our “joggafy” lesson, what did that term spell for us?  Icebergs, polar bears, and the snows of eternal winter.  Nine-tenths of the people in America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen silence where human beings seldom penetrate.  What did we find there?  Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,—­Mrs. Pierre la Hache.  Tenny wears his “other clothes” and a resplendent l’Assumption belt, for this is his home.  “It looks like a swan on the water,” he says, when the first white houses come into view.  “You like it, do you not?” “Like it?  Good Hope is God’s Country!” There is no place like home, even when it is the Arctic Circle!