FIELDS OF ICR 97 



able wall How many times have the explorers of Arctic seas tried 

 in vain to find a passage through these barriers, and have remamed 

 imprisoned in the solid mass, after having ventured mto some 

 deceitful opening of the ice-field ! , , , j 



These interminable white surfaces are almost always bordered on 

 the seaward side by blocks and disks rocking or whirlmg on the 

 billows; these are the scattered islands which announce the neigH- 

 bourhood of continents of ice. Those which are elevated on an 

 averao-e from 3 to 6 feet above the water, and the bases of which 

 descend from 20 to 25 feet below the surface, have sometimes a toler- 

 able uniformity of aspect, and when at times the snow covers all m- 

 equalities the ice-field seems to be transformed mto an even plain 

 like the Russian Steppes. But the ice is much more often rugged ; 

 fantastic hillocks, formed of all the wreck-fragments which the 

 floes of ice have thrown up in dashing against each other, appear 

 here and there several yards high. There are some which one 

 mio-ht even confound with the enormous blocks that have taileu 

 from the glaciers of Greenland or of Spitzbergen, and which 

 really cannot be distinguished from them but by the shghtly sahno 

 taste of the ice. These projecting masses are seen from afar above 

 the sea, and remain erect long after the ice-field has melted. In the 

 Siberian seas, where they give them the name of foroses, most of 

 these hillocks, composed of the ice of the preceding winter, are easily 

 melted by the first warmth of summer ; but there are some which are 

 preserved from year to year, and which remain indestructible during 

 centuries, even under the rays of the sun The Ostiac hunter , 

 who frequentlv see these ioroses run aground on the Siberian coast, 

 designate them "Adam's ice," and imagining that they are contem- 

 poraneous with the origin of the world, assert that even fire itself is 

 powerless against their crystalline masses.* 



In spring-time and in summer, when the great heat eommences m 

 the poL zone, the force of the currents, whose action constantly 

 iefuself felt beneath the ice plains, detaches from the remainder 

 r the mass enormous fields of ice several hundred square miles 

 in extent, and carries them far towards the open sea. Thej^^'^ 

 of the explorers or whalers, which have been set fast m the bed 

 of ice, are then carried out of their course -* "o^n fieR 

 Courageous sailors who have penetrated beyond Baffin s Bay have 

 often t\us been brought back by the current for hundreds and thou- 

 sands of miles, and have only been able to regam the way they 



* F. de Wrangel, Voyfrffe, Appendice, p. 3U. 



