CON WAY'S EXPLORATIONS 47 



when, as the surface thaws, the pressure of the en- 

 closed air exceeds that of the superincumbent weight, 

 these cavities break up with the peculiar cracking 

 sound heard in summer from the glacier ice that floats 

 about in the fjords. Occasionally broad channels were 

 crossed, of which the only way to ascertain the depth 

 was to lower a man into them, and frequently he had 

 to be hoisted up again without having reached the 

 bottom; such danger areas causing so circuitous a 

 route that much progress was impossible. 



Prior to the explorations of Sir Martin Conway in 

 1896, it was supposed that this inland ice extended 

 over all the islands of the group, an area exceeding 

 twenty thousand square miles. He, however, proved 

 that so far as West Spitsbergen was concerned, this 

 was not the case. Crossing it he found much of the 

 interior a complex of mountains and valleys, amongst 

 which were many glaciers, as in Central Europe, but 

 with no continuous covering of ice, each glacier being 

 a separate unit with its own drainage system and 

 catchment area, the valleys boggy and relatively fertile, 

 the hillsides bare of snow in summer up to more than 

 a thousand feet above sea-level. In the rise of the 

 country from the sea it seems to have come up as a 

 plain which did not reach the level of perpetual snow, 

 so that as it rose it was cut down into valleys in the 

 usual way by the agency of water pouring off from 

 the plateau over its edge down a frost-split rock-face, 

 the valleys gently sloped, the head necessarily steep 

 owing to the face of the cliff being stripped off as the 

 waterfalls cut their way back. 



Since Nordenskiold's first expedition we have learnt 



