chap. in. TO SPITSBERGEN 4 7 



commanded. I cannot hope to convey in words the 

 beauty and grandeur of that view ; the poet to the expe- 

 dition might perhaps have done justice to it, but unfortu- 

 nately I had left him shooting sandpiper on the marshes 

 below. It was so similar and yet so different from the views 

 to be seen on a fine day from any of the famous summits 

 in the Alps. 



It was my first peep into the scenery of Arctic lands. 

 When coasting northwards on the previous day, thick banks 

 of fog had hung in curtain-like folds along the land, in- 

 creasing our curiosity in the country that lay behind. Now 

 these had all rolled away, revealing a fairyland of ice and 

 snow. The sun shone with a tempered glow in a wonderful 

 sky of turquoise blue, a sky whose colour was different from 

 anything I had ever seen above the snow-fields of the Alps, 

 where, on cloudless days, owing to the absence of sus- 

 pended particles, the colour of the sky often approaches 

 black. My immediate interest lay in the direction of the 

 interior, and I eagerly scanned the scene of our future 

 operations. 



Inland to the east and south the eye wandered over seem- 

 ingly endless ranges of undulating snow : a few rocky peaks 

 were beginning to push their dark points through the thick 

 mantle of snow, accumulated during the last long Arctic 

 night, like the first young shoots of the snowdrop on the 

 approach of spring. Snow filled the valleys to the east in 

 the direction of Coles Bay, damming back the drainage and 

 forming lakes, and stretching shorewards till it merged into 

 the frozen margin of the fjord. In the bay at my feet 

 gigantic icebergs of a wondrous blue shimmered in the 

 frosty light as they glided seawards on the ebbing tide. Be- 

 yond lay the ice-pack, and at the back of beyond lay that 

 mysterious region whose secret so many had tried in vain 

 to solve, and which, in spite of many an heroic effort, it still 



