Читать книгу The White Czar. A Story of a Polar Bear онлайн

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The hunter found later that his fears were groundless.

When the Eskimo found himself overtaken by the blizzard, he simply dug a good-sized house in a snow bank and the dogs also dug in and he slept as comfortably as he would have at home in his own igloo.

The Eskimos are nominally Christian, those on the East coast of North America having come under the influence of the Moravian church in 1771. The Eskimos of the Alaskan peninsula probably felt the influence of the Greek church at about the same time as some of the most beautiful bells used upon the Greek churches in Asia were cast in Alaska, one hundred and fifty years ago.

The heathen conception that the Eskimo had of creation was much like that of most other primitive people. They believed that the earth was flat and supported by four pillars. But we believed that it was flat until about four hundred years ago. They believed that the sky was the floor of another world where some of the good people went after death. They also thought that there was another world under our world where some of the spirits of the dead went. They were fatalists and believed they were ruled by external powers and these powers were usually bad. Much of this fatalism still clings to them.