The ship's was turned after work on the whale had been finished. I expected we would soon run into the ice again. We sailed on and on, but not a block of ice big enough to make a highball did we sight. The white floes and drifts and the frozen continent floating southward, along the coasts of which we had cruised for whales and which had surrounded us and held us captive for three weeks, had disappeared . The warm water from the south, the southern winds, and the spring sunshine had melted the ice. Its utter of magic.  
A long hilly coast rose ahead of us covered with grass, barren of trees or , dotted with blackened skeletons of old ice—an land. It was Siberia. We put into a bight called St. Lawrence Bay. There was an Eskimo village on the shore. The huts were made of whale covered with hides of and . In the warm weather, some of the hides had been removed and we saw the white gleaming bones of the frame work. We could see the dogs with tails curling over their backs frisking about and could hear their clamor as they bayed the great white-winged thing that had come up from over the sea's .
 
In this first part of July it was continuous day. The sun set at eleven o'clock at night in the northwest. Its disc remained barely below the horizon—we could almost see its flaming . A molten glow of color made the sky resplendent just above it as it passed across the north pole. It rose at 1:30 in the morning high in the northeast. All the time it was down a brilliant prevailed—a twilight like that which in our zone immediately follows the sinking of the sun behind a hill. We could see to read without difficulty.
 
Soon boats and kyacks were putting off from the village. When we were still a mile or two out, strange craft came alongside and Eskimo men, women, and children aboard. Very they looked in clothes made of the skins of reindeer, hair seals, dogs, and squirrels, oddly trimmed and decorated with fur in queer designs. Some of the women wore over their furs a yellow water-proof cloak made of the of fish, with needle-work figures and quite neat looking.
 
The men and the older women had animal faces of low intelligence. The young girls were extremely pretty, with , coal-black hair, bright black eyes, red cheeks, lips like ripe cherries, and gleaming white teeth forever showing in the laughter of irresponsibility and perfect health.
 
The captain ordered a bucket of hardtack brought out in honor of our guests. The biscuit were dumped in a pile on the main deck. The Eskimos gathered around in a solemn and circle. The old men divided the bread, giving an equal number of hardtack to each.
 
This ceremony of welcome over, the Eskimos were given the freedom of the ship, or at least, took it. We kept a careful watch upon them, however, to see that they took nothing else. Several of the Eskimo men had a sufficient smattering of English to make themselves understood. They had picked up their small vocabulary among the whalers which every spring put in at the little ports along the Siberian and Alaskan coasts. One of them had been whaling to the Arctic Ocean aboard a whale ship which some accident had left short handed. He better English than any of the others and was evidently regarded by his fellow townsmen as a wonderfully intellectual person. He became quite friendly with me, showing his friendship by begging me to give him almost everything I had, from tobacco to clothes. He constantly used an Eskimo word the meaning of which all whalers have learned and it assisted him materially in telling his stories—he was a great story . This word was "pau,"—it means "nothing." I never knew before how important nothing could be in human language. Here is a sample of his use of "nothing:"
 
"Winter," he said, "sun pau; daylight pau. All dark. Water pau; all ice. Land pau, all snow. Eskimo igloo, plenty fire. in blubber oil all time blaze up. Cold pau. Plenty hot. Eskimo, he sweat. Clothes pau. Good time. Hot time. Eat plenty. Sleep."
 
This seemed to me a good, vivid description. The picture was there, painted chiefly with "nothing."
 
Of course he had the English words "yes" and "no" in his , but his way of using them was pure Eskimo. For instance: "You wear no clothes in winter?" I asked him. "No," he replied. "No?" I echoed in surprise. "Yes," he said. His "yes" merely affirmed his "no." It sometimes required a mental process to follow him.
 
A pretty girl came up to me with a smile and an ingratiating air.
 
"Tobac," she said holding out her hand.
 
I handed her my smoking plug. She took half of it at one cavernous bite and gave the remainder back to me, which I thought considerate. She enjoyed the tobacco. She chewed upon it hard, working her as if she were a dainty tidbit. Did she expectorate? Not a drop. She evidently did not propose to waste any of the flavor of that good weed. Neither did she get sick—that pretty Eskimo girl. At last when she had chewed for twenty minutes or so, she removed her quid and stuck it behind her right ear. She chewed it at later on, always between times wearing it behind her ear.
 
I rather expected our guests would depart after a call of an hour or so. Not so. They had come to stay indefinitely. When they became tired they lay on deck—it didn't make any particular difference where—and went quietly to sleep. They seemed to have no regular time for sleeping. I found Eskimos asleep and awake during all my deck watches. As it was day all the twenty-four hours, I wondered if these people without did not sometimes get their hours mixed up.
 
New parties of Eskimos kept coming to see us. One of these had killed a walrus and the skin and the raw meat, butchered into portable cuts, lay in the bottom of their big family canoe of hide. The boat was tied alongside and the Eskimos came aboard. If any of them became hungry, they climbed down into the canoe and ate the raw walrus meat, their lips over it. When the sailors would lean over the rail to watch this strange of , the Eskimos would smile up at them with mouths with blood and hold out a red in invitation. It was their joke.
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