skin. This was a remnant of her mother's father's
clothing, a amulet given her as a child, when saliva from the maternal
grandfather's mouth had been rubbed on her lips, and which she believed
protected her from ill fortune.

"Io-ooh! io-oh!" Annadoah moaned in pain.

The women forgot their own tragedies. They forgot the messages they
were imparting to the dead. Directly they might not be able to invoke
any effective curse upon Annadoah; but well they knew, indeed, the
awful power of the disembodied. And to the dead in the cold shuddering
sea they told how Annadoah had played with the men, how she had
betrayed them to the white traders, cajoling them to rob themselves of
food, and how, because of her, famine now confronted the tribe; they
told of the long devotion of Ootah, the desired of all the maidens, and
how Annadoah had rejected him.

Possessed by a frantic contagion of released rage, their voices rose
and fell in a frightful chanting malediction. In the weird gloom their
vague forms leaped about, their arms writhing like black things in the
air as they called the names of their individual dead to hear.

As their voices approached a crescendo they danced with increasing
hysteria. Some shrieked and fell to the ice groaning, their bodies
twisting in convulsions. Others laughed madly--laughed at the
dreadful horrors with which the dead would smite Annadoah. Losing all
control they were carried away by their delirious malevolence; their
voices reached a high shrill pitch. Their arms clawed the air.
Through the dead curses were invoked upon Olafaksoah, the great trader,
who had cowed them and robbed them. They begged of the _tornarssuit_
that he might be rended by wolves, that his body might rot unburied,
and that the spirits of his limbs might be severed and be compelled to
wander in restless torment forever. They called anathemas upon his
unborn children; and of their dead, who should be imprisoned in
darkness in the depths of the sea, they furiously invoked upon
Annadoah's offspring the curse of the long night . . . Their voices
shuddered over the ice as they demanded that most dreadful of all
dreaded evils--that Annadoah's child might be born as blind to light
and the joy of light as the dead in the sea.

Annadoah crouched in frantic terror upon the ice. From the Greenland
highlands a moaning echo answered the women. To Annadoah the hill
spirits had joined in cursing her--all nature seemed to u