lves, but people! I was in the midst of my friends;
they had stopped and were waiting for me.

Now I felt happy. John's dog also felt happy for he wagged his tail and
looked at me, and John said, "Paulus, if you had been lost, my dog would
have found you."

Then they exclaimed: "We would never have gone to the sea without you.
We would have wandered all over the mountains with our reindeer or on
our skees to find you. But we thought your reindeer would follow our
track, for he could scent ours, as the wind was in the right direction;
and here we were waiting for you." I could hardly hear their voices,
though they surrounded me, for they were drowned in the hissing of the
wind.

We continued our way and came to another house of refuge, where we took
shelter. There we could wait until the storm was over.

It was so nice to stretch one's legs and to stand up and pace the floor
and bring the blood into circulation.

What would the people do while travelling in such a climate without
houses of refuge? The place of refuge was a mountain farm; they had
cows, goats, and sheep, for there were pastures near by in summer.

When the time to sleep came I stretched myself at full length upon a
reindeer skin on the floor, and fell asleep hearing the wind howling
fiercely round the house.

When I awoke in the morning the storm had ceased. I washed my face and
hands in water and dried them with a clean towel which the wife handed
me. What a luxury!

After breakfast we bade the kind people of the house of refuge good-bye,
and once more we were on our way to the Arctic Sea. We had not been two
hours on the way, however, when the sky began to grow gray and
apparently a storm was coming; the wind increased, and flakes of snow
began to fall; the squalls increased in force and frequency. Little did
I know that these were the forerunners of a series of great windstorms
that were to take place nearly five thousand feet above the sea. In a
word, I was to encounter the greatest windstorms I have ever met in my
life. The dark clouds kept flying very fast high over our heads, then at
times seemed to be hardly above the top of the mountains. The sky became
wild and peculiar. John was hurrying his reindeer as fast as he could by
striking his flanks. He evidently knew what was coming, for he was a
child of the stormy regions of the North, and knew what such a
threatening sky meant in March. The wind was increasing in force every
minute, the