138 



THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 



[chap. 



and at a little distance from it there is projected from the ice a 

 column of water, which, like a geyser with a large intermittent 

 jet in which the water is mixed with air, rises to a great height. 

 Now and then a report is heard, resembling that of a cannon 

 shot fired in the interior of the icy mass. It is a new crevasse 

 that has been formed, or if one is near the border of the ice- 

 desert, an ice-block that has fallen down into the sea. For, like 

 ordinary collections of water, an ice-lake also has its outlet into 

 the sea. These outlets are of three kinds, viz., ice-rapids, in 

 which the thick ice-sheet, split up and broken in pieces, is 



uaUESLAND lUE FJoRD. 



Afier a desit^n drawn and lithographed by a Greenland Eskimo. 



pressed forward at a comparatively high speed down a narrow 

 steeply-sloping valley, where ice-blocks tumble on each other 

 with a crashing noise and din, and from which true icebergs 

 of giant-like dimensions are projected in hundreds and thousands ; 

 broad, sloivly-advayicing glaciers, which terminate towards the 

 sea with an even perpendicular face, from which now and then 

 considerable ice-blocks, but no true icebergs, fall down ; and 

 smaller statiormry glaciers, which advance so slowly that the ice 

 in the brim melts away about as fast as the whole mass of ice 

 glides forward, and which thus terminate at the beach not with 



