The blood streams down their feathers, and their beating wings splatter it on the rock. Their blood streams down to the water, and their blood-drenched down is scattered by the waves. The great startled birds are trying to protect their young! Eric, menaced by their claws, slashes them with his knife. And then from the waves arises a vortex of enraged spume; driven between the walls of the abyss by the sea wind, white as the swans’ down, it rises, rises, rises, and driven furiously upward with its neverending spirals of feathers, disappears in the sky which we see, whirlpool blue, when we look upward.

On these schistous cliffs the guillemots build their nests. The females remain perched; the males fly around them; they cry out stridently and their cries and the noise of their wings deafen anyone who approaches. They fly in such great hordes that they darken the sky in passing; they wheel ceaselessly. Grave, motionless, never shrieking, the females stand expectantly in a row on a huge ridge where the rock overhangs slightly. They sit on their solitary eggs, deposited there furtively, like droppings, and not in nests but on the bare sloping rock. They sit there, rigid and grave, holding the eggs between their feet and tails to keep them from rolling off.

The ship ventured between the sheer cliffs, into a dark, narrow fiord; the rocks seemed to drop sharply to unknown depths in the transparent water, appearing at times to be the reflection of the cliffs; but the depths were dark and the cliffs white with birds. The males above our heads made so much noise that we could not hear each other. We were advancing slowly; they seemed not to see us. But after Eric, a skilled slinger, hurled a few stones into the opaque cloud and killed several of them with each stone, causing them to fall near the ship, then their redoubled cries enraged their mates on the cliff; leaving behind the nuptial rock and the hope of progeny, all of them took flight, emitting horribly strident screams. It was a fearsome army; we were ashamed of the commotion, especially when we saw all the doomed eggs, now forsaken and no longer held against the ridge, roll down the cliff. They rolled the entire length of the cliff, their broken shells leaving horrible white and yellow trails. Some of the more devoted brooders tried in taking flight to carry their eggs in their claws, but the eggs soon fell out and broke on the blue sea, dirtying the water. We were upset by the commotion and left in great haste, for the terrible stench of the coveys was beginning to engulf us.

… In the evening, at the time for prayers, Paride had not returned; we looked for him and called out to him until night, but we were unable to find out what had happened to him.

The Eskimos live in snow huts; their huts, stretched out across the plain, look like tombstones; but their souls are entombed with their bodies; a wisp of smoke rises from each hut. The Eskimos are ugly; they are small; there is no tenderness in their love-making; they are not voluptuous and their joy is theological; they are neither evil nor good; their cruelty is unmotivated. Inside their huts it is dark; one can hardly breathe there. They neither work nor read; nor do they slumber; a small lighted lamp mitigates the long night; as the night is motionless, they have never known the meaning of an hour; as they need not hurry, then-thoughts are slow; induction is unknown to them, but from three tenuous hypotheses they deduct a metaphysics; and the succession of their thoughts, interrupted from start to finish, devolves from God to man, while their life becomes this succession; they measure their age by the point which they have reached; some have never managed to arrive at the point of their existence; others have passed it by; still others have not noticed it. They have no common tongue; they are forever reckoning. Oh! I could say much more, for I understand them quite well. They are stunted, pug-nosed, slovenly. Their women have no diseases; they make love in the dark.

I am speaking of the more intelligent Eskimos; there are others who, at the dawning of the solemn day, cut short the succession of the syllogism and depart for the frozen sea and the melting snow in search of reindeer and moose. They also fish for whales and return with the dark, laden with a new supply of blubber.

Each climate has its rigors, each land its diseases. In the warm lands we had seen the plague; near the marshlands, lingering illnesses. Now an illness was springing up from the very absence of sensual delights. The salty provisions, the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, and the studied resistance in which we took such great pride; the joy of living wretchedly in unkind lands, and the strong attraction of the outside world on our enraptured souls gradually eroded our strength; and while our souls had then longed, serene, to undertake supreme conquests, scurvy was beginning to afflict all of us and we remained dejected on the deck of the ship, trembling for fear that we would die before finishing our tasks.* Oh, chosen tasks! Most precious tasks! For four days we remained in that condition, not far from the land of our expectation; we saw its icy peaks plunging into the slushy sea; and I believe that our voyage would indeed have come to an end at that point if not for the exquisite liquor that Eric had taken from the Eskimos’ hut.

Our blood had become too thin; it was escaping from all over our bodies; it oozed from our gums, from our nostrils, from our eyelids, from under our nails; it seemed at times to be nothing more than a stagnant humor and almost to cease circulating; the slightest movement made it pour out as from a tilted cup; under the skin, in the tenderest areas it formed livid spots; our heads swam and we were overcome by a feeling of nausea; our necks ached; because our teeth were loose and shook in their alveoli, we could not eat dry sea biscuit; cooked in water it formed a thick pap in which our teeth stuck and remained. Rice tore the skin from our gums; about all we could do was drink. And lying listlessly on the deck all day long, we dreamed of ripe fruits, with fresh tasty meat, of fruits from the islands we had once known, from the pernicious islands. But even then I believe that we would have refused to taste them.