to steal over Chingatok's face as he
gazed at the southern horizon while listening to these strange rumours,
and a very slight smile of incredulity had glimmered on his visage, when
it was told him that one of the floating islands of these Kablunets, or
white men, had been seen with a burning mountain in the middle of it,
which vomited forth smoke and fire, and sometimes uttered a furious
hissing or shrieking sound, not unlike his own voice when he was a
Skreekinbroot.

The giant said little about these and other subjects, but thought
deeply. His mind, as we have said, was far ahead of his time and
condition. Let us listen to some of the disjointed thoughts that
perplexed this man.

"Who made me?" he asked in a low tone, when floating alone one day in
his kayak, or skin canoe, "whence came I? whither go I? What is this
great sea on which I float? that land on which I tread? No sledge, no
spear, no kayak, no snow-hut makes itself! Who made all that which I
behold?"

Chingatok looked around him, but no audible answer came from Nature. He
looked up, but the glorious sun only dazzled his eyes.

"There _must_ be One," he continued in a lower tone, "who made all
things; but who made _Him_? No one? It is impossible! The Maker must
have ever been. _Ever been_!" He repeated this once or twice with a
look of perplexed gravity.

The northern savage had grasped the grand mystery, and, like all true
philosophers savage or civilised who have gone before him, relapsed into
silence.

At last he resolved to travel south, until he should arrive at the
coasts where these strange sights before described were said to have
been seen.

Having made up his mind, Chingatok began his arrangements without delay;
persuaded a few families of his tribe to accompany him, and reached the
north-western shores of Greenland after a long and trying journey by
water and ice.

Here he spent the winter. When spring came, he continued his journey
south, and at last began to look out, with sanguine expectation, for the
floating islands with wings, and the larger island with the burning
mountain on it, about which he had heard.

Of course, on his way south, our giant fell in with some members of the
tribes through whom the rumours that puzzled him had been transmitted to
the far north; and, as he advanced, these rumours took a more definite,
also a more correct, form. In time he came to understand that the
floating islands were gigantic