Next day they parted company with the young natives, who carried with them the pot-stone lamp, much to the priest's annoyance, as he was nearly frozen when they entered the igloo on the river ice. Powder Horn under pressure showed his ingenuity in providing a substitute. Picking up a piece of drift-wood, he hollowed it out lamp-shaped, and covered its bottom and sides with pebbles and flat stones. As moss was lacking for the wicking, he plucked a pinch of hair from his deerskin sleeping-robe, twisted it into a mesh, and the lamp was ready. During the night a violent gale buried the igloo in a snow-drift. The river ice was under such storm-pressures and it oscillated so strongly and continuously to and fro that they all feared that the river would open and swallow them up. Throughout the whole night the roaring of the wind, the groaning of the ice, and the quivering of the igloo made sleep impossible. As they passed the river's mouth the third day the landscape was one of frightful sterility. Snow became thin and scanty, the ice was rougher, and the bare spots of ground seemed to have no signs of vegetation, trees and shrubs failing utterly. Nature was worse than dead with its apparent desolation. Here both man and beast was doomed alike to a constant and eternal struggle for bare existence in this adverse environment. The lack of material and the ingenuity of the Inuits in wresting a bare subsistence from this forlorn country was indicated by a most efficient fox-trap made entirely of ice. Long after dark the wearied sledge dogs with loud howlings broke into a rapid run, and were welcomed with fierce yells from the rival teams of the Eskimo village, a dozen large snow houses on the shores of Liverpool Bay. So dim was the light and so strange the garments and the attitudes of the native women, fur-clad and crawling on all-fours from the huts, that the missionary could scarcely distinguish them from the dogs. Introduced to the people of the village by his Inuit protector as the Son of the Sun, he was made welcome after the manner of the country. His efforts at conversions did not bear visible fruit, though the natives listened gravely to his sermons on kindness and goodness, on chastity and honesty, on wifely fidelity and motherly love. Doubtless he was best remembered in after days, as he himself suggests, "As the man who ate when a little pocket-sun [chronometer] told him; who guided himself on the trail by a live turning-iron [compass]; who made fire by rubbing a bit of wood on his sleeve [matches]; and who by looking hard at something white [prayer-book] made it possible for the Inuit to catch black foxes--the most valuable of all their furs."