chap, xxi WIJDE BAY 285 



Mount Loven. Keeping pretty close to the ice-cliff we had 

 a better opportunity of watching the form and behaviour 

 of a large sheet of inland ice than ever before. 



As in the glaciers near Ice Fjord, so here crevasses 

 were numerous, but all blocked by new snow as soon as 

 formed. The drainage is thus kept on the surface. Water 

 flows down channels, which it cuts into deep grooves. 

 These become arched over by later fallen snow, which 

 swiftly turns to ice, so that the wet channel of one year 

 tends to become a dry tunnel the next. The sections of 

 such dry tunnels, made by the terminal ice-cliff, revealed 

 blue grottoes of marvellous beauty. More impressive, how- 

 ever, than these, and even than the great fissured cliff itself 

 with all its azure facets, was the vast, gently curving ice- 

 field, reaching back so far under the heavy grey cloud 

 canopy, which here and there rested upon it, and inter- 

 rupted its long low sky-line, casting upon its spotless 

 surface an infinite gradation of the tenderest shadows. The 

 whole scene was marvellous beyond all power of words ; 

 most memorable was the gravity of the colouring, the dark- 

 green sea, the purple rocks, the blue glacier cliff, the near 

 grey, the remote yellowish snow, and over all the dull 

 leaden-grey of the clouds, combined into a solemn harmony 

 of tone over which brooded the great silence of the north. 



The view defiled before us as we passed, and made the 

 enormity of the scale of the ice-phenomena gradually ap- 

 parent to the senses. With slow movement the cloud-roof 

 kept drifting from the east, very low down, trailing sometimes 

 a skirt of falling snow, which blotted out everything beneath 

 it. Gloomy Lomme Bay showed the bulging cliffs streaked 

 with snow that wall it round and keep back the ice-sheet 

 except from its head, which a land-locked storm hid from 

 us. Wide low Wahlenberg Bay on the other side contrasts 

 with Lomme Bay in character. Its north side is formed 



