i86 LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. [XT. 



awful, mysterious lustre on glacier and mountain ; no atom 

 of vegetation gave token of the earth's vitality : an universal 

 numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude. 

 I suppose in scarcely any other part of the world is this 

 appearance of deadness so strikingly exhibited. On the 

 stillest summer day in England, there is always perceptible 

 an under-tone of life thrilling through the atmosphere ; and 

 though no breeze should stir a single leaf, yet— in default of 

 motion — there is always a sense of growth ; but here not so 

 much as a blade of grass was to be seen on the sides of 

 the bald excoriated hills. Primeval rocks and eternal ice 

 constitute the landscape. 



The anchorage where we had brought up is the best to be 

 found, with the exception perhaps of Magdalena Bay, along 

 the whole west coast of Spitzbergen ; indeed it is almost the 

 only one where you are not liable to have the ice set in upon 

 you at a moment's notice. Ice Sound, Bell Sound, Horn 

 Sound — the other harbours along the west coast — are all 

 liable to be beset by drift-ice during the course of a single 

 night, even though no vestige of it may have been in sight 

 four-and-twenty hours before ; and many a good ship has 

 been inextricably imprisoned in the very harbour to which 

 she had fled for refuge. This bay is completely landlocked, 

 being protected on its open side by Prince Charles's 

 Foreland, a long island lying parallel with the mainland. 

 Down towards either horn run two ranges of schistose rocks, 

 about 1,500 feet high, their sides almost precipitous, and the 

 topmost ridge as sharp as a knife, and jagged as a saw ; the 

 intervening space is entirely filled up by an enormous glacier, 

 which, — descending with one continuous incline from the 

 head of a valley on the right, and sweeping like a torrent 

 round the roots of an isolated clump of hills in the centre- 

 rolls at last into the sea. The length of the glacial river from 

 the spot where it apparently first originated, could not have 

 been less than thirty, or thirty-five miles, or its greatest 

 breadth less than nine or ten ; but so completely did it 

 fill up the higher end of the valley, that it was as much 



