They secured a rope of leather lashings and placed a noose about the old man’s neck.  Then they dragged his body from the wrecked igloo.  Weak from lack of food, they still forced themselves to dig up the frozen snow at a spot where they knew there were stones, for according to their belief they had to bury the old man—­otherwise, his spirit would haunt them.  To this spot they brought the rotted skins of his bed, and on them placed the body, fearful lest they touch it.  By the body they placed the old man’s lamp, stone dishes, membrane-drum and instruments of incantation.  Over the corpse they piled the ice encrusted stones, and over these in turn weighty masses of frozen snow.  Then they turned in silence and entered their respective shelters.  Thenceforth, until a child should be born to whom it could be given, the name of Sipsu might not pass their lips.

VI

“As he looked upon the descending wraiths, Koolotah saw they had the spirit-semblance of gleaming faces, and that their eyes burned, through the enveloping cloud-veils, like fire . . .  ‘The dead—­the dead . . .’ he said, ‘we have come into a land of the dead.’ . . .

“Then the glacial mountainside to which he clung trembled . . . the silver-swimming world of white dust-driven fire became suddenly black—­and the earth seemed removed from under him . . ._”

Leaving the low-lying shore, Ootah’s path led up through a narrow gorge between two great cliffs.  Since he had returned from the mountains the path had been covered by many successive falls of snow.  At places the path sloped abruptly downward at a terrible angle, and the ice cracked and slid beneath the hardy hunters’ feet.  With the agility of cats, the dogs fastened their claws into the ice and climbed upward.

Constantly the two men had to hold to the jagged rocks to their right, otherwise, time after time, they would have slipped into the perilous abyss below.  Through the chasm the moon poured its liquid rays.  At certain points towering crags shut off the light—­then Ootah and his companion had to feel their way slowly upward in the dark.  Finally Ootah’s dogs, with a loud chorus of barking, leaped ahead.  Seizing an overhanging ledge of rock Ootah lifted himself to the top of the precipice.  Koolotah’s team followed.

For interminable miles a vast icy plateau stretched before them—­a plain glistening with snow and reflecting like a burnished mirror the misty silveriness of the moon.  Over the glacial expanse an eerily greenish phosphorescence, which palpitated and shifted at times with vivid splashes of opal and deeper tones of burning blue, hung low.

The upland was split with thousands of canyons that writhed over the white expanse like snakes in tortuous convulsions.  From these bottomless abysses arose a luminous amethystine vapor.  In the depths jutting icicles took fire and glowed through the lustrous mists like burning eyes.  Where the chasms joined with others or widened, ominous shapes, swathed in wind-blown blackish-purple robes, with extended arms, took form.  As Ootah and Koolotah dashed forward, great spaces of clear ice palpitated on all sides of them with interior opaline fires.