And now, again, the song died away; the motion grew slower and slower, until at last she stood before them motionless and panting.

“Ke-ke!  Ke-ke!” (More!  More!) they shouted, in their excitement, forgetting that this was a dance of death.

Tearing the deer skin parka from her shoulders and standing before them in her purple pajamas, she began again the motion and the song.  Slow, dreamy, fantastic was the dance and with it a chant as weird as the song of the north wind.  “Woo-woo-woo.”  It grew in volume.  The motion quickened.  Her feet touched the floor as lightly as feathers.  Her swaying arms made a circle of purple about her.  Then, as she spun round and round, her whole body seemed a purple pillar of fire.

At that instant a strange thing happened.  As the natives, their minds completely absorbed by the spell of the dance, watched and listened, they saw the purple pillar rise suddenly toward the ceiling.  Nor did it pause, but mounting straight up, with a vaulting whirl disappeared from sight.

Overcome by the hypnotic spell of the dance, the natives sat motionless for a moment.  Then the bark of a dog outside broke the spell.  With a mad shout:  “Pee-le-uk-tuk Pee-le-uk-tuk!” (Gone!  Gone!) they rushed to the entrance, trampling upon and hindering one another in their haste.

* * * * *

When Johnny reached the piling ice, on his way across the Strait, he at first gave his entire attention to picking a pathway.  Indeed this was quite necessary, for here a great pan of ice, thirty yards square and eight feet thick, glided upon another of the same tremendous proportions to rear into the air and crumble down, a ponderous avalanche of ice cakes and snow.  He must leap nimbly from cake to cake.  He must take advantage of every rise and fall of the heaving swells which disturbed the great blanket winter had cast upon the bosom of the deep.

All this Johnny knew well.  Guided only by the direction taken by the moving cakes, he made his way across this danger zone, and out upon the great floe, which though still drifting slowly northward, did not pile and seemed as motionless as the shore ice itself.

While at the village at East Cape Johnny had made good use of his time.  He had located accurately the position of the Diomede Islands, half way station in the Strait.  He had studied the rate of the ice’s drift northward.  He now was in a position to know, approximately, how far he might go due east and how much he must veer to the south to counteract the drift of the ice.  He soon reckoned that he would make three miles an hour over the uneven surface of the floe.  He also reckoned that the floe was making one mile per hour due north.  He must then, for every mile he traveled going east, do one mile to the south.  He did this by going a full hour’s travel east, then one-third of an hour south.

So sure was he of his directions that he did not look up until the rocky cliffs of Big Diomede Island loomed almost directly above him.