186 SPITSBERGEN chap, xm 



mashed together. Everything one touched was cased in 

 mud. Mud covered our clothes, oozed over on to the tent 

 floor, and gradually encroached everywhere, so that we 

 became indescribably filthy. There was no opportunity to 

 wash, for there was only liquid mud to wash in. Beyond 

 a brief radius all was milk-white fog, through which the 

 wind seemed to blow and the rain to fall without moving 

 it. The fulmar petrel procession continued as before, and 

 ghostly birds kept emerging and vanishing on their end- 

 less eastward way. Two brent geese were standing on 

 the snow close by the tent, surrounded by their young 

 ones. How the rain did pour down ! There was not 

 much encouragement to keep abroad. But the ponies 

 needed consolation in the form of such small ration of 

 oats as remained, eked out with a few biscuits. The brutes 

 were dreadfully hungry, and snatched at the poor fragments 

 with eagerness. They rubbed their heads against us, and 

 seemed to beg to be taken away. At last, though the fog 

 did not lift, the rain almost ceased. There was no more 

 talk of peak-climbing; the word was, "All hands to the 

 packing." Down came the tents, their canvas stiff and 

 heavy with wet. They were rolled up anyhow, and layers 

 of mud of necessity rolled in with them. It was a filthy 

 business. Hands, and ultimately faces too, almost disap- 

 peared behind a brown mask. The extremity of our 

 discomfort induced a strange indifference, wherein the dis- 

 comfort itself almost disappeared. " There is," said Gregory, 

 "a portage in Canada, called the Speak-no-bad-language 

 Portage ; I wonder whether it deserves the name better 

 than this valley." 



By slow degrees the sledges were loaded, laced, and 

 roped with the foul apparatus, and the preliminary work 

 was done. If the bogs were bad on the way up, what 

 would now be their condition ? This was the thought of 



