They housed him at night in their huts, where the filth
and the stench were unendurable. They showed their special regard
by first licking off the piece of seal they put before him, and if
he rejected it they were hurt. Their housekeeping, of which he got
an inside view, was embarrassing in its simplicity. The dish-washing
was done by the dogs licking the kettles clean. Often, after a night
or two in a hut that held half a dozen families, he was compelled to
change his clothes to the skin in an open boat or out on the snow.
But the alternative was to sleep out in a cold that sometimes froze
his pillow to the bed and the tea-cup to the table even in his own
home. Above all, he must learn their language.
It proved a difficult task, for the Eskimo tongue was both very
simple and very complex. In all the things pertaining to their daily
life it was exceedingly complex. For instance, to catch one kind of
fish was expressed by one word, to catch another kind in quite
different terms. They had one word for catching a young seal,
another for catching an old one. When it came to matters of moral
and spiritual import, the language was poor to desperation. Egede's
instruction began when he caught the word "kine"--what is it? And
from that time on he learned every day; but the pronunciation was as
varied as the workaday vocabulary, and it was an unending task.
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