46 SPITSBERGEN 



at Seven Islands, and returned round North East 

 Land. It took him five days to pass across the 

 twenty- three miles between Phipps Island and Cape 

 Platen over pyramids of angular ice up to thirty 

 feet high. On the coast, which he found extending, 

 as Leigh Smith had reported, much further to the 

 east than was shown on the charts, he met with the 

 inland ice ending in precipices from two thousand to 

 three thousand feet high. Ascending this ice they 

 had scarcely gone a quarter of a mile before one of 

 the men disappeared at a place where the surface was 

 level, and so instantaneously that he could not even 

 give a cry for help. When they looked into the hole 

 they found him hanging on to the drag-line, to which 

 he was fastened with reindeer harness, over a deep 

 abyss. Had his arms slipped out of the harness, a 

 single belt, he would have been lost. Along the level 

 surface every puff of wind drove a stream of fine snow- 

 dust, which, from the ease with which it penetrated 

 everywhere, was as the fine sand of the desert to the 

 travellers in the Sahara. By means of this fine snow- 

 dust, steadily driven forward by the wind, the upper 

 part of the glacier which did not consist of ice, but 

 of hard packed blinding white snow was glazed and 

 polished so that it seemed to be a faultless, spotless 

 floor of white marble, or rather a white satin carpet. 

 Examination showed that the snow, at a depth of four 

 to six feet, passed into ice, being changed first into a 

 stratum of ice crystals, partly large and perfect, then 

 to a crystalline mass of ice, and finally to hard glacier 

 ice, in which could still be observed numerous air 

 cavities compressed by the overlying weight ; and, 



