GEOLOGY AND SCENERY OF NOBTHEAST COAST 101 



made startling by the brilliance of the high lights under 

 a northern sun, might well cause the savage mind to people 

 these mountains with sinister devils. 



A noble introduction to the Torngats is to be found as 

 the vessel bound for Nachvak Bay rounds the long finger- 

 like promontory of Gulch Cape, ten miles south of the Bay 

 entrance. All along the shore cliffs of gray, naked rock, 

 streaked with great black seams (dikes) of trap, rise 2000 to 

 2500 feet directly out of the sea, and terminate in sharp 

 peaks and ridges. One of the latter has been appro- 

 priately named "Mt. Razor-back." Imagine four miles 

 of a saw-toothed pile of rock, nearly 3500 feet high and 

 furrowed on the seaward face by a score of deep gulches 

 which cleave the mass from top to bottom, and each of 

 the lateral ridges in like manner broken by a dozen ravines 

 on each slope, and you have a picture of mountain-land 

 without a parallel on all the American coast of the Atlantic 

 to the southward. Between the great ridges open long, 

 flat-floored valleys that have been moulded into their 

 present forms by the glaciers of the Ice Age. During a 

 memorable day the Brave beat up the Inlet, her crew and 

 passengers enjoying an ever changing panorama recalling 

 in its grandeur the cliffs and fiords of Norway. 



Nachvak Bay forms a trough running transverse to the 

 range and heading some 30 miles from the Atlantic, at a 

 point more than halfway across the mountain-belt. It is, 

 therefore, fortunately situated for the exploration of the 

 Torngats. For a half-dozen miles together its walls present 

 steep, or even nearly vertical, precipices, their heads often 

 covered with clouds a half-mile above the sea. At one 

 salient angle formed by the meeting of two branches of 



