i28 SPITSBERGEN chap, ix 



the rich atmosphere dyed rocks and distances as with the 

 priceless product of Tyrrhenian seas, and the eye, gaze in 

 what direction it might, beheld no form that was not largely 

 dignified, and no tints that were not rich and harmoniously 

 combined. A cloud-bank lay flat below the northern sky, 

 and a few collar clouds encircled the throats of nearer peaks, 

 whilst round white islands drifted over the blue heavens ; 

 but they formed only to fade again, and indicated no lurking 

 ill-temper of the sky. 



An hour's walk led to the north foot of Sticky Keep, 

 which was rounded some 200 feet above the plain. On the 

 wide ridge was a polygonal bog of strange regularity. The 

 muddy disintegration of the friable rocks above, here lies 

 almost flat for a while in its slow, glacier-like descent. Ex- 

 panding and contracting between extremes of temperature, 

 it becomes cracked up hexagonally. Seeds find lodgment in 

 the cracks, which thus become outlined by ridges of mossy 

 and other increasing vegetable growths. The naked mud 

 within the hexagons again, by processes of freezing and 

 thawing, is forced up into rough and broken domes, whilst 

 the vegetation grows into bosses and clogs the water wash- 

 ing down from snow-beds above. The ground becomes 

 saturated, and a regular bog is formed, which moves 

 slowly downward, sometimes splitting into crevasses, or 

 giving way into stream channels, whilst, at the time of 

 great snow melting, small mud rivers flow down on to it, 

 and further diversify and confuse the soft and tangled surface. 

 As the ground beneath is released from its winter bondage, 

 the whole becomes softer and less stable. Thus it flows, rather 

 than falls, to the valley below, where it comes to relative repose 

 on the wide and ever-widening boggy flat. 



Farther up the hill-sides one can watch the process, 

 whereby the mud is formed out of the soft horizontally- 

 bedded rocks of which the hills are built. Melting snow 



