Following is a one-page excerpt:

To go back to the previous Journal, click here.

Winds howling outside my window, all in darkness. I awake from a crazy dream of myths and classical images, no doubt an aftereffect of my trip to the Middle East. I have been following a group of children rollicking through a high vaulted museum or pantheon. They heave a volleyball through a fountain of deities -- broken columns or remains of deities. It bounces, splashes, and lands far below the high pedestal, in front of a young beautiful woman, sitting at a desk, who looks up in time to catch the ball which comes whizzing at her. A muted light, as if from a museum skylight, floods the vaulted hall. The woman's legs are bleeding. A chase ensues with the children. Returning to consciousness, I recall where I am. I awake to the howling Arctic night.

8:30 am. Lighter, but still blowing. I phone for information on my flight, but there is no answer at the airport. Below the window, one truck tows another. I blow my nose and my ears ache -- I become aware there is a connection. The waiting is nerve wracking.

8:45 am. Girl at desk calls up: my flight to Cape Dorset is cancelled till tomorrow. I am not surprised. Suddenly the prospect of another day and night in this place weighs heavily. I am imprisoned, numb. I reason that this is good because my cold is quite severe. A day in bed will help. But I quickly get dressed. Three Eskimo girls, dressed in chambermaid costumes, make up my room. I descend to the fluorescent restaurant.

Sipping coffee and munching unfrozen toast, I watch the same waitresses, busying themselves with dreary details, rewiping clean tables, restacking stacks of cigarettes, counting customers. I now begin to notice drawings -- or rather, painted figures -- on the white plasterboard walls. Isolated on this hard clean background, they are depictions of Eskimos 'doing their thing.'
Two pull a dead seal across the white wall. Snow is intended, made solid by turquoise blue foot tracks or maybe shadows. An Eskimo mother with her baby on her back smiles a cute mischievous smile of contentment, an ear-to-ear grin. I wonder who painted it. The details on her costume are rendered in thick gobs of oil or gouache. She seems pinned to that wall, hemmed in by that white nothingness, her only point of reference being a few dry brush strokes for gravity, filled in around her feet. The baby has fat jowls and looks unspeakably happy.

Across the room -- beside the ice machine(!), which every few minutes expectorates a dozen, rectangular cubes on to an ever-growing pile in a large glass repository -- is a single painted Eskimo man in a fur parka, who appears to be flicking a very long whip with great intensity. Though his eyes are lifeless, he reminds me, for some odd reason, of an ancient Egyptian frieze man. The whip, with a methodical energy of its own, curls quite a distance in front, up and over him, and back along the length of the wall, ending, rather unconvincingly, several yards behind him in front of the cash register.

In the booth next to me is a tall balding man, sitting erect, peering straight ahead, consuming what look like scrambled eggs. I recognize him from yesterday's flight. He is oblivious to everything but his meal. Finishing my toast, I reflect that everything I have eaten here is either starch (bread, pie, potatoes) or canned or frozen. I resolve to try and avoid the starch.
Back to the room, but first an attempt to make conversation with the girl at the reception desk. Young -- early 20s -- plain, but not unattractive, she speaks English with a trace of an accent. Questioning her about the flight, she shrugs good-naturedly: we must wait for tomorrow's weather report. I sense she doesn't know what she is talking about. I tell her my business in Dorset. She seems unimpressed. I ask where she is from and when she tells me Quebec City, I reply in French. She makes one French reply and retreats to English. I am disappointed. Here only five months, she answered a newspaper advert for 'an exciting hotel career.' She likes it here. I go up to my room again, undress for bed, reasoning that this unexpected delay will help cure my cold, which seems worse.

PG7 10 am. Radio-phone call from Terry Ryan in Cape Dorset. Voice crackling, he infers flight is cancelled for other reasons than weather. Nordair is famous for excuses. 'Have fun in the big city,' he says, then 'Roger, roger, over.' Back to bed.

The curtains are drawn. It is daytime. There are noises of snowmobile gasoline motors piercing the air. Inside my room, it is dark and warm. I lie here, letting my mind roam. Only last week, I was in Beersheba in the Judean desert. I congratulate myself on a world first, assuming I am the first person to go from Jerusalem to Frobisher Bay within one week. From one promised land to another (promising?). I can still smell the lemon and grapefruit trees of seven days ago. Only the sky and stars convince me I am on the same earth. Last week I soaked up sunshine and shimmering light, pushed my way through earth and stone passages and the colourful markets of a 2000-year-old city. Now I sit on permafrost. Below me is ice. Above me the air is thick with ice particles. Yet children play and live here.

Studying the room more carefully, I begin to realize it is almost exactly the same as the one I occupied in the King David hotel in Jerusalem and the Aeroport Hilton in Montreal. What omnipotent planner decreed that all entries, closets, bathrooms, mirrors, dressers and wardrobes should be in the same place, and contain the same fixtures? If I look out the window, I still see cedars of Lebanon, orange groves, azure blue waves washing the shore. Is it just a week-old after-image, made all the clearer against a background of ice? Why don't the planners and builders save themselves the trouble: just change the view from the window with a set of slides, instead of travelling all over the world to erect the same box-cells.

11 am. Sun's up. Smoke curls from everything. The fiery ball doesn't seem to be doing much here. It doesn't belong. Neither do I.