Alaska's summer days were unforgettable. At 58 degrees north latitude, eighteen hours of daylight brought strange and wondrous natural sights. First, two hours before the sun officially rose, the night would gradually brighten, forming a dawnlike "white night." And when the sun did rise, it would not climb straight up into the sky as it did in tropical Mesoamerica.
It would rise from the south like a slanted eye, gazing over from south to north. Even at noon, it left everyone who looked up at it with a long shadow slanting due north. That tangible gaze was like something that had come from the highlands of Mesoamerica, crossing twelve thousand li of ocean, until it merged with the towering, glittering snowy mountains of Great Whale Island and enveloped the endless far-northern sea!
"Praise be to You! Your gaze envelops my body and soul... May the Lord God protect us!"
When the hungover Losanda woke in his tent, the first thing he did was go to the temple altar at the port. Then, with the divine emblem of Hummingbird flashing golden light, he knelt beneath the southern noonday sun and prayed toward the Sun Lord God and the direction of his homeland.
"O Lord God! Thank You for bestowing such long daylight, letting the crops grow swiftly, letting the potato harvest be abundant, and the salted fish fill the stores..."
The Main God Temple on Great Whale Island was not especially large, but it could absolutely be called "precious." Its exterior was built plainly and without ornament, the structure rough and sturdy like a small stone fort. It looked utterly inconspicuous, save for the more than one hundred Kingdom and tribal warriors guarding it day and night. Yet beneath this "perfectly ordinary" temple lay the "treasury" of the entire Western Sea