Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/80

66 into an Eskimo community. The people on that strip were still living as if in the most modern city, surrounded by servants, with bedrooms and dressing rooms and baths in suite, library and drawing-rooms. They dressed for dinner, as at home, and sat about a mahogany table laden with food that was cooked by a French chef and served by English stewards.

As Margaret and her brother looked over the rail at the sod and stone huts and tents on the shore and at the swarthy, semibarbarous seal hunters in their kayaks or on the shore, and then glanced back to the yacht, they knew that the journey into the North had not yet begun. Though in mere distance travelled more than half the journey was behind, the difficulties, the dangers, even all the discomforts, still were ahead. They had not left civilisation or any of its important luxuries; they merely had brought them a few thousand miles with them. Their expedition really would start with the arrival of the Viborg at that point.

The trading ship dropped a boat and brought to the yacht the Danish captain, who was familiar with the Inca's errand. His ship,