188 SPITSBERGEN chap, xm 



and were similarly passed ; we thus turned nearly half 

 the bog-slopes and some of the worst places. It was 

 rather exciting, and we warmed to the work, but the out- 

 look always remained the same, and rain kept falling at 

 intervals. 



It is remarkable how, when a man is at work in the 

 open air, nature brings his mental condition into harmony 

 with his surroundings. Whilst waiting somewhere for the 

 caravan I had time to look about. Undoubtedly there 

 was an element of grandeur in the scene. The fog 

 dignified everything it did not hide. It magnified the ice- 

 walls by the river into mighty cliffs, and broadened the 

 snow-flats on either side into a weird wilderness, ending 

 in large slopes of featureless bog, grandly curving and 

 fading away into vagueness and final invisibility. By the 

 water's edge the broken ice took strange forms, jutting up 

 or overhanging after the manner of seracs. 



When the snow ended there was no alternative but to 

 traverse the bogs again. We followed our old tracks to 

 the edge of the moraines and over them, with slight devia- 

 tions where improvements were obvious. This moraine- 

 traverse with sledges was really the most difficult piece of 

 work we had in Spitsbergen. The place is not easy to 

 describe. Let the reader acquainted with glaciers imagine 

 a steep-sided main valley with a glacier snout entering it 

 at right angles down a steep side valley. This glacier 

 formerly blocked the main valley to a height of some four 

 hundred feet. In retreating to its present dimensions it 

 left behind its moraine-laden snout, through the midst of 

 which the main valley's river has cut a gorge, still leaving 

 piled up on either side the old moraine mounds with ice 

 under them. We had to force a way over these moraines, 

 which are perhaps best described as ice-hills, covered with 

 deep mantles of mud and stones, and plastered on the 



