FRANZ JOSEF FIORD 269 



gone considerable modification. We feel this sadden- 

 ing interest with greater force when we reflect that the 

 distance of Clavering's village from the coast of Scot- 

 land is under one thousand miles. They were our 

 nearest neighbours of the New World." 



A little north of the seventy-third parallel Koldewey 

 discovered on his way home the magnificent Franz Josef 

 Fiord. Here the grandest scenery in Greenland is to 

 be found along its deep branches winding among the 

 mountains, one of which, Mount Petermann, is over 

 eleven thousand feet high. As the Germania entered 

 this remarkable inlet, which extends inland for some five 

 degrees of longitude, a fleet of icebergs were sailing out 

 of it with the current ; the farther she advanced the 

 warmer seemed the temperature of the air and surface 

 water, and the wilder and more impressive became the 

 grouping of the mighty cliffs and peaks with their lofty 

 waterfalls and raging torrents and deep glacier-filled 

 ravines. It was the great geographical discovery of the 

 expedition. 



Meanwhile Hegemann, trying to pass to the north 

 more to the westward, got the Hansa beset on the 9th 

 of September some twenty-four miles from Foster Bay. 

 As the ice-pressure threatened to become too great for 

 the vessel to resist, an elaborate house was planned and 

 built on the floe. Briquettes were used for the walls, 

 the joints were filled up with dry snow on which water 

 was poured, and in ten minutes it hardened into a com- 

 pact mass. The house was twenty feet long, fourteen 

 feet wide, and four feet eight inches high at the sides, 

 with a rising roof consisting of sails and mats covered 

 with deep snow. Into this house, which took a week 



