Fuji Yama, which the
Japanese love so much and call 'the Honourable Mountain.' At Unalaska or
Ilinlink, the 'curving beach,' we stop. If we could stay over for awhile,
there are a great many interesting things we could see; an old Greek
church and the government school are in the town, and Bogoslov's volcano
and the sea-lion rookeries are on the island of St. John, which rose
right up out of the sea in 1796 after a day's roaring and rumbling and
thundering. In 1815 there was a similar performance, and from time to
time the island has grown larger ever since. One fine day in 1883 there
was a great shower of ashes, and, when the clouds had rolled away, two
peaks were seen where only one had been, separated by a sandy isthmus.
This last was reduced to a fine thread by the earthquake of 1891, and I
don't know what new freaks it may have developed by now. I know some
friends of mine landed there not long ago and cooked eggs over the jets
of steam which gush out of the mountainside. Did you ever hear of using a
volcano for a cook-stove?"

"Well, I should say not," said Ted, amused. "These Alaskan volcanoes are
great things."

"The one called Makushin has a crater filled with snow in a part of
which there is always a cloud of sulphurous smoke. That's making
extremes meet, isn't it?"

"Yehl[13] made many strange things," said Kalitan, who had been taking in
all this information even more eagerly than Teddy. "He first dwelt on
Nass River, and turned two blades of grass into the first man and woman.
Then the Thlinkits grew and prospered, till darkness fell upon the earth.
A Thlinkit stole the sun and hid it in a box, but Yehl found it and set
it so high in the heavens that none could touch it. Then the Thlinkits
grew and spread abroad. But a great flood came, and all were swept away
save two, who tossed long upon the flood on a raft of logs until Yehl
pitied, and carried them to Mt. Edgecomb, where they dwelt until the
waters fell."

[Footnote 13: Yehl, embodied in the raven, is the Thlinkit Great Spirit]

"Old Kala-kash tells this story, and he says that one of these people,
when very old, went down through the crater of the mountain, and, given
long life by Yehl, stays there always to hold up the earth out of the
water. But the other lives in the crater as the Thunder Bird, Hahtla,
whose wing-flap is the thunder and whose glance is the lightning. The
osprey is his totem, and his face glares in our blankets and totems."