The Romance of Polar Exploration

ecret revealed-An Eskimo Legend-At the Iron Mountain-Removing the Trophies-A

ments. These consisted of rudely made knives, the cutting edges of which were fashioned out of very hard iron; harpoons and spears, tipped with iron points. Questioning the natives as to how they had become possessed of the iron, they explained that it had been obtained from what they termed the "iron mountain" on the coast near the bay

possession of Eskimo which could not have been obtained from whalers or visiting ships, as well as making every inquiry in order to ascertain where the mysterious iron moun

ay that no other explorer had yet done. This is hardly to be wondered at, when it is remembered that his presence among them, from time to time, raised them from the stress of hardship and poverty, often starvation itself, into a happy, well-to-do, and, for an Eskimo tribe, prosperous community. When he first went among them, the man who owned a wooden shaft for his harpoon was regarded as a rich man, while the woman who had a steel sail-needle was an heiress for whose hand the bravest and best strove in fierce rivalry. The possession

ot prepared to do for their benefactor. They worked, hunted, acted as guides, porters-anything, in fact, the white men wanted t

, and a dog. The man was deep in the ground, the woman partly so, and the dog lay on the surface. As the woman fell, she sat up, and her head had first been seen. A strange tribe came over the ice one year and, in greed, broke off the head and sought to carry it away with them in their kayaks, so that they should have a store of the iron always with them. But Tornarsuk would not allow this to be, and as soon as the kayaks, lashed together to make them strong enoug

Tallakotteah began looking about until a bit of blue trap-rock, projecting above the snow, caught his eyes. Kicking aside the snow, he exposed more pieces, saying this was a pile of the stones used in pounding fragments from the iron mountain. He then indicated a spot four or five feet distant, as the location of the long-sought object. Ret

ARMS AN

s. (c) Lance for Walrus and Bear. (d) Harpoon for Sealing. (e)

, while in addition there had been generations of Eskimo chipping it for knives and spear tips. The amount of iron which had been broken from it in this way was shown by the pile of stones lying around it.

away, as became his dignity and size, for he was found to be a mighty mass, one hundred tons in weight, rugged in form, and so

ched pending the return of another season. The removal of the "dog" did not offer any great difficulty, and the "woman" was levered out of the ground and con

is, however, was merely a fin-like excrescence on the main mass, which, as the excavation proceeded, was shown to measure twelve feet long by eight feet in width, on the upper face, while a trench three feet round it did not reach to the base. It was then realised that the task of transferring such a huge mass from the place where it lay in the ground to the ship was one requiring great engineering skill and the use of appliances of much greater strength than the Kite had brought with her. The mass was about three hundred yards from high-water mark and eighty feet above it. A shelf of rock ran out into the sea immediatel

and angular form it presented made it an extremely difficult object to handle. All the time available was devoted to making the preliminary arrangements for the definite work of removal in the following season, and, as soon as the ice began to gather

describing the experience: "The first thing to be done was to tear the heavenly visitor from its frozen bed of centuries, and, as it rose inch by inch under the resistless lift of the hydraulic jacks, gradually displaying its ponderous sides, it grew upon us as Niagara grows upon the obser

rom the meteorite itself wherever it came in contact with a more than usually hard piece of rock. The irregularities in its form added to the difficulties, for it was almost impossible to secure firm holds for the jacks, and anything approaching a slip on the part of the mass was tantamount to death or destruction to any one within reach of it. Day and night the struggle went on, the mass seeming to resist every inch of the way, settling itself into awkward corners and crevices; cutting its way, as it fell, through

o one side was a faint glow of light through the skin wall of a solitary tupik. Working about the meteorite was my own little party, and, in the foreground, the central figure, the raison d'être of it all, the 'Saviksoah,' the 'Iron Mountain,' towering above the human figures about it and standing out, black and uncompromising. While everything else was buried in snow, the Saviksoah was unaffected. The great flakes vanished as they touched it, and the effect was very impressive. It was as if the giant were saying,

ich to warp the mass from the shore on to the ship. The bridge completed, forty-eight hours were consumed in getting the mass on to it. The pressure of its enormous weight put so great a strain on the woodwork that it visibly gave as the mass came on to it, and more than once a collapse seemed imminent. Once a slip of less than an inch upset the equilibrium of everything to such an extent that the stays and supports were

lunge into the sea, carrying the ship and all on board with it. From the time work was recommenced on the task of removing the mass, storms and gales had persisted and the sun had not been seen. The Eskimo were, therefore, deeply impressed when, just as

en the return journey was commenced the Hope had to fight her way through a series of the most severe gales and storms that any on board had experienced. The meteorite had yielded, but the Spirit of the Arctic evidently had serious objections to it being carried off. But the years of persistent