THE SUMMER EXPEDITION TO THE ICE-CAP 



same process. These lessons, which were repeated 

 almost daily after supper, yielded chiefly the com- 

 mon substantives in both languages. 



The next morning the Taserssuak, which means 

 great lake, was quite placid and we were up by 

 four o'clock for an early start. I had breakfast 

 ready by five o'clock and the umiak was soon loaded 

 and we were rowing up the lake. Straight ahead 

 across the western arm of the lake we could see 

 another stream passing through a canyon within 

 a series of beautiful elevated beaches each of which 

 was sharply outlined like a railroad embankment 

 and the group together making a well defined 

 staircase. These terraces formed in clay deposits 

 are of a type quite generally to be found at the 

 heads of fjords of Greenland and also in lakes 

 like this one, which occupy a part of an earlier 

 fjord. They revealed to us in unmistakable lines 

 that after the fjord had been shaped by the glacial 

 tongues which pushed out from the borders of a 

 once much larger ice-cap, the continent sank until 

 the sea flowed up the broad bottomed valleys, but 

 later made a partial and interrupted recovery to the 

 accompaniment of earthquakes, each of which has 

 left its record in one of the steps of the staircase. 

 It was at the foot of this series of elevated shore- 

 lines that Nordenskj old's expedition made one of 



67 



