those who have endured severe hardships and mastered many
seals, passing through this first residence, find that the other
mansions regularly improve. They finally reach an abode of perfect
satisfaction, far beneath the storms of the sea, where the sun is
never obscured by night, and where reindeer wander in great droves
beside waters that never congeal, and wherein the whale, the
walrus, and the best sea fowls always abound.7 Hell is deep, but
heaven deeper still. Hell, they think, is among the roots, rocks,
monsters, and cold of the frozen or vexed and suffering waters;
but

"Beneath tempestuous seas and fields of ice
Their creed has placed a lowlier paradise."

The Greenlanders, too, located their elysium beneath the abysses
of the ocean, where the good Spirit Torngarsuk held his reign in a
happy and eternal summer. The wizards, who pretended to visit this
region at will, described the disembodied souls as pallid, and, if
one

5 Jarves, Hist. of the Sandwich Islands, p. 42.

6 Christoph Meiners, Vermischte Philosophische Schriften, 169-173.

7 Prichard, Physical Hist. of Mankind, vol. i. ch. 2.

sought to seize them, unsubstantial.8 Some of these people,
however, fixed the site of paradise in the sky, and regarded the
aurora borealis as the playing of happy souls. So Coleridge
pictures the Laplander

"Marking the streamy banners of the North, And thinking he those
spirits soon should join Who there, in floating robes of rosy
light, Dance sportively."

But others believed this state of restlessness in the clouds was
the fate only of the worthless, who were there pinched with hunger
and plied with torments. All agreed in looking for another state
of existence, where, under diverse circumstances, happiness and
misery should be awarded, in some degree at least, according to
desert.9

The Peruvians taught that the reprobate were sentenced to a hell
situated in the centre of the earth, where they must endure
centuries of toil and anguish. Their paradise was away in the blue
dome of heaven. There the spirits of the worthy would lead a life
of tranquil luxury. At the death of a Peruvian noble his wives and
servants frequently were slain, to go with him and wait on him in
that happy region.10 Many authors, including Prescott, yielding
too easy credence to the very questionable assertions of the
Spanish chroniclers, have attributed to the Peruvians a belief in
the resurrection of the body. Various travellers an