sarily slow, and it took a long time to obtain even
a half pint of the liquor, but the whisky made up in strength what it
lacked in quality, and it did not take much of it to intoxicate, which
(from a Tchuktchi standpoint) was the principal object. I am told on
reliable authority that, on the Alaskan coast, the Eskimo women join
freely in the drunken debauches of the men, but this was certainly not
the case amongst the Siberian natives, at any rate those at Whalen. For
throughout our stay there I only once saw an intoxicated female. This
was the wife of Teneskin, who during an orgie was invariably the only
inebriated member of his household. But she certainly made up for the
rest of the family!

CHAPTER XIII

AMONG THE TCHUKTCHIS--(_continued_)

The time at Whalen passed with exasperating slowness, especially after
the first ten days, when monotony had dulled the edge of success and
worn off the novelty of our strange surroundings. On the Lena we had
experienced almost perpetual darkness; here we had eternal daylight,
which, with absolutely nothing to do or even to think about, was even
more trying. Almost our sole occupation was to sit on the beach and gaze
blankly at the frozen ocean, which seemed at times as though it would
never break up and admit of our release from this natural prison. Every
day, however, fresh patches of brown earth appeared through their white
and wintry covering, and wild flowers even began to bloom on the
hillsides, but the cruel waste of ice still appeared white and unbroken
from beach to horizon. One day Harding fashioned a rough set of chessmen
out of drift-wood, and this afforded some mental relief, but only for a
few days. "Pickwick" had been read into tatters, even our Shakespeare
failed us at last, and having parted with the "_Daily Mail_ Year Book"
at Verkhoyansk, this was our sole library. Sometimes we visited our
neighbours, where we were generally kindly received, presents
occasionally being made us. One day the Chief's eldest daughter worked
and presented me with a pair of deerskin boots with a pretty pattern
worked in deerskins of various colours, obtained from dyes of native
manufacture. I naturally wondered how these could be extracted from
natural products in this barren land of rock, sand and drift-wood, but
Billy partly explained the secret of the operation which is, I fancy,
peculiar to the coast.[63] The ex-whaleman furnished me with this
information during a tal