At Etah

For the Eskimos of Etah, Greenland, the gods still tread the earth. They had seen white men before but never any such as those who last week enabled them to talk to one another at a distance by means of curious, bell-ringing contraptions connected by wires; who showed them silent, black-and-white scenes of people walking, gesticulating, moving their mouths as in speech, upon a white sheet spread in a dark place; who demonstrated a still stranger spark-spitting apparatus they called a "radio," by which the white men said they talked with their kind far south in the U. S.; who capped all by fitting together on the beach monstrous yellow-backed mechanical birds with red-white-and-blue tails, pushing them out on the water, poking them until they roared and soaring away in them high over the coastal glaciers and dizzy ledges where only little auks can live. Commander Richard E. Byrd of the naval aviation unit accompanying Explorer Donald B. MacMillan (TIME, June 22 et seq.) reported his trial flights entirely satisfactory. The party only waited for heavy fogs to lift before taking off for Axel Heiburg Land, where the first advance air base was to be made.

P: On a trial flight, MacMillan and Byrd crossed Smith Sound to Sabine Point on Ellesmere Island, where Lieut. A. W. Greeley wintered in 1884, losing 18 soldiers by starvation. Soaring 90 miles farther westward, the planes came to the head of Froler Bay, turned and were back in camp in an hour, having covered in two hours a route of 200 miles which would have taken dogs and sledges a fortnight.

P: While mechanics and aviators tuned the planes, the expedition's radio operator continued exchanging messages with the U. S. on his short-wave set (16 to 40 metres). In Illinois, newspaper reporters had the question flashed :

"Have you reserved seats for use when Washington wins the World's Series?" Immediately came the answer :

"Afraid not be back in time to help Washington root for Griffith [Clark Griffith, President of the Washington American League Baseball Club]."

(Signed) "[Lieut-Commander E. F.]

MACDONALD"

P: Sailors from the ships Bowdoin and Peary occupied a few of their many consecutive hours of daylight with a hunting trip, were attacked by "an infuriated herd of at least 100 walrus," escaped without injury.