XL] FIRST SIGHT OF SPITZBERGEN. 177 



I had turned in for a few hours of rest, and release from 

 the monotonous sense of disappointment, and was already 

 lost in a dream of deep bewildering bays of ice, and gulfs 

 whose shifting shores offered to the eye every possible com- 

 bination of uncomfortable scenery, without possible issue, — 

 when "a voice in my dreaming ear" shouted " Land T and 

 I awoke to its reality. I need not tell you in what double 

 quick time I tumbled up the companion, or with what 

 greediness I feasted my eyes on that longed-for view, — the 

 only sight — as I then thought — we were ever destined to 

 enjoy of the mountains of Spitzbergen ! 



The whole heaven was overcast with a dark mantle of 

 tempestuous clouds, that stretched down in umbrella-like 

 points towards the horizon, leaving a clear space between 

 their edge and the sea, illuminated by the sinister brilliancy 

 of the iceblink. In an easterly direction, this belt of un- 

 clouded atmosphere was etherealized to an indescribable 

 transparency, and up into it there gradually grew — above 

 the dingy line of starboard ice — -a forest of thin lilac peaks, 

 so faint, so pale, that had it not been for the gem-like dis- 

 tinctness of their outline, one could have deemed them as 

 unsubstantial as the spires of fairy-land. The beautiful 

 vision proved only too transient ; in one short half hour 

 mist and cloud had blotted it all out, while a fresh barrier 

 of ice compelled us to turn our backs on the very land we 

 were striving to reach. 



Although we were certainly upwards of sixty miles distant 

 from the land when the Spitzbergen hills were first observed, 

 the intervening space seemed infinitely less ; but in these 

 high latitudes the eye is constantly liable to be deceived in 

 the estimate it forms of distances. Often, from some change 

 suddenly taking place in the state of the atmosphere, the 

 land you approach will appear even to recede ; and on one 

 occasion, an honest skipper — one of the most valiant and 

 enterprising mariners of his day — actually turned back, 

 because, after sailing for several hours with a fair wind 

 towards the land, and finding himself no nearer to it than at 



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