H2 SPITSBERGEN chap, x 



By midnight my work was done ; all the baggage was 

 grouped by the river-side, except a pile of geological speci- 

 mens packed in tins, in charge of which, and of the reindeer 

 skeleton, was a solitary skua, who croaked some kind of 

 farewell at me as I finally turned on my heel. Five minutes 

 later a crowd of gulls were in occupation of the abandoned 

 site. The river, where we had to ford it, was swollen to 

 over a hundred yards in width, with low stone-beds emerg- 

 ing from the water here and there. By selecting a zigzag 

 course, shallow places could be found, so that the ford was 

 nowhere deeper than a few inches above the knee. The 

 water was ice-cold and the current rapid. I sat down tired 

 on the bank and thought the prospect dismal. Long it 

 seemed before the others returned ; there was no sign of 

 them over the dismal flat or along the sloping foot of Sticky 

 Keep. Distant lumps of moss on the sky-line against the 

 mist sometimes mimicked the forms of their heads. No 

 breeze stirred, nothing moved save the muddy torrent. The 

 only sounds were its treble babblings, and the faint bass 

 note of the hidden waterfall ; rarely a bird's cry broke the 

 silence. A flock of eider-ducks flew by, but never a goose. 

 The bereaved birds had gone away. A garden of little white 

 flowers blossomed about me in the dry mud. There was 

 no novelty amongst them. I sat on, smoking, and thinking of 

 many things, as the stream flowed by, but with one eye fixed 

 on any hill-slope that might be clear, in hopes to see a rein- 

 deer. None appeared ; only grey erratic blocks or dusty snow- 

 patches mimicking their form. At last the absentees emerged 

 from a distant island of fog. The cooking-pot was set boiling, 

 and, when they arrived, hot soup consoled them for the 

 streams they had forded, and the fog that prevented their 

 finding one of the piles of things, and thus deprived their 

 labour of half its reward, and incidentally wasted another 

 day of my time. 



