He soothed her little hands.  A wondrous light burned in his eyes.  Every fibre of his being yearned for her.  But Annadoah’s hands were cold, her eyes were sullenly turned away.  In her heart a vague fear of him, a resentment of his very love, stirred.

“My shadow yearns to the south,” she repeated pathetically.  “I shall wait.  Perhaps he will come as he said when the spring hunting sings.”  In her heart she feared that he would not.

Ootah in utter anguish dropped her hands.  Annadoah sadly turned away.  Falling to his knees on the ice, he covered his face with his arms.  The sound of his heartbroken sobbing was drowned in the funereal chant of the women as, in a long procession, they passed near him on their way to the shore.

When he raised his head, the rim of the moon, a great quarter-disc of silver, peeped above the horizon.  A mystical melancholy light flooded the gloriously gleaming desolate white world.  The ice floes glistened as with the dust of diamonds.  The ice covered faces of the promontories glowed with the sheen of burnished metal.  The clouds became tremulous masses of argent phosphorescence.  Far away the women’s chants subsided.  One by one they joined the men in their grotesque dances in the distant igloos.  Ootah was left alone.

He gazed long upon the pearly lamp of heaven.  The subtle sorrow of this world of magical moonlight filled his soul.  Then the hopelessness and tragedy of all it symbolized were unfolded to him, and, extending his arms in a vague wild sympathy, in a vague wild despair, he moaned: 

“Desolate and lonely moon!  Oh, desolate and unhappy moon! . . .  Desolate and unhappy is the heart of Ootah!”

Far away, in her shelter, Annadoah heard the sobbing voice of Ootah.  And nearer, in an igloo where the men beat drums and danced, she heard the voice of Maisanguaq laughing evilly.  Of late Maisanguaq had gibed her with her desertion; he was bitter toward her.  But nothing mattered to Annadoah.  She thought of the blond man in the south, and the pleading of Ootah.  As she heard his weeping, she shook her head sadly.  She beat her breast and muttered over and over again: 

“Do the gulls that freeze to death in winter fly in springtime?”

V

“What they heard was, to them all, the Voice of the Great Unknown, . . .  He who made the world, created the Eternal Maiden Sukh-eh-nukh, and placed all the stars in the skies . . .  Whose voice, far, far away, itself comes as the faintly remembered music of long bygone dreams preceding birth . . .  And now, out of the blue-black sky, great globes of swimming liquid fire floated constantly, and dispersing into feathery flakes of opal light, melted softly . . .”