io6 SPITSBERGEN chap vn 



into cloud. A fold of the ground hid all the area that had 

 become so familiar to us during the last few days. I was 

 absolutely alone in a new world, hitherto seen only by 

 occasional reindeer hunters. Under such circumstances the 

 dullest imagination should be quickened. Nowhere was 

 there trace of man. Abundance of reindeer horns lay about, 

 and the tracks of reindeer were in all directions, but not 

 a footprint of man or of any domestic animal could be 

 descried. Wild birds flew about me inquisitively, flocks 

 of geese honked at me as I moved forward. The scenery 

 was, in fact, tame and dull, but circumstances invested it 

 with a strange prestige. Its rich purple tones, its wide- 

 expanding forms, its suggestive peeps of cloud-enveloped 

 crags, sufficed to quicken the fancy, so that I walked along 

 in the bleak dull day as in a dream, full of a nameless and 

 indescribable delight. Work involved frequent halts, for the 

 bend of the valley closed out known points and opened 

 new ones that had to be linked to the old before the oppor- 

 tunity was lost. Thus the others came up with me in course 

 of time, all wet to the knees like myself, and we could 

 indulge in a little common complaint. The ponies were tired 

 after their long march the day before, and they too com- 

 plained, though the route had continued unusually good. 



A mound of ancient moraine here stood in the midst of 

 the valley. Evidently it must have been formed by a glacier, 

 which once descended the large side-valley from the north, 

 whose mouth we presently opened. If the clouds had been 

 less thick and low we should doubtless have noticed the 

 importance of this depression, but it was only a month later, 

 when we looked down upon its head from the top of Mount 

 Lusitania, that we discovered it to be the end of a deep 

 trough, cutting through the mountains from Ice Fjord, and 

 dividing into two almost equal parts the mountain group 

 between Advent Vale, the Sassendal, and the fjord. Any one 



