her to his home beyond the sea. Too late she found that he had deceived her. When her relatives tried to rescue her, the bird raised such a storm that they cast her into the sea to save themselves; she attempted to cling to the boat, but they cut off her hand, and she sank to the bottom, her severed fingers being transformed into whales and seals of the several kinds. In her house in the depths of the sea Nerrivik dwells, trimming her lamp, guarded by a terrible dog, and ruling over the animal life of the deep. Sometimes men catch no seals, and then the Angakut go down to her and force or persuade her to release the food animals; that is why she is called the "Food Dish." It is not difficult to perceive in this Woman of the Sea a kind of Mother of Wild Life—a hunter folk's goddess, but cruel and capricious as is the sea itself.
In the house of Sedna is a shadowy being, Anguta, her father. Some say that it was he who rescued her and then cast her overboard to save himself, and he is significantly surnamed "the Man with Something to Cut." Like his daughter, Anguta has a maimed hand, and it is with this that he seizes the dead and drags them down to the house of Sedna—for her sovereignty is over the souls of the dead as well as over the food of the living; she is Mistress of Life and of Death. According to the old Greenlandic tradition, when the Angakut go down to the Woman of the Sea they pass first through the region of the dead, then across an abyss where an icy wheel is forever revolving, next by a boiling cauldron with seals in it, and lastly, when the great dog at the door is evaded, within the very entrance there is a second abyss bridged only by a knifelike way. Such was the Eskimo's descensus Averno.[8]
IV. THE WORLD'S REGIONS
As the Eskimo's Inland is peopled with monstrous tribes, so is his Sea-Front populous with strange beings.[9] There are the Inue of the sea—a kind of mermen; there are the mirage-
