SUMMER JOURNEYS. 153 



beasts had disturbed our possessions. There was some ice inside the 

 tent, and so we lay on the hillside in the sun, but it soon grew too 

 warm for us, and we were driven inside. In the evening we turned 

 out and went up on to the neck of land leading to Nordfjord, 

 Simmons to botanize, and I, if possible, to find some game. But 

 the result was not very satisfactory, for the snow was still too 

 deep for Simmons, and I did not discover a single trace of any- 

 thing edible. Towards morning we returned, fed the dogs, and 

 cooked ourselves some delicious pemmican lobscouse. 



We were very curious to know whether our travelling tent 

 would answer in the great heat, and so put it up, but again the 

 warmth drove us inside the station tent with its double walls. 



Not far off, a merry little stream was purling among the 

 stones. It had been frost-bound when we were here in the 

 winter, but now, innocent and crystal-clear, was singing its short 

 summer ditty. It was so busy merely living, had such thousands 

 of things to be joyful over ; it laughed to itself, bubbled with good- 

 humour, and chattered about every secret under the sun. Un- 

 fortunately for it, we prosaic people thought ourselves constrained 

 to break in on its careless idyl. We brought the water along 

 a tin spout, under which we were able to do a little in the way of 

 cleanliness for ourselves and our cooking utensils ; though, as 

 a rule, washing was not a thing that we troubled ourselves much 

 about on our sledge-journeys. 



We soon saw that we should do well to go on to Nordfjord 

 as quickly as possible; the vegetation there would probably be 

 much farther advanced than here, and we could, moreover, take 

 these tracts on our way back. On the evening of July 5, there- 

 fore, we drove to Noresund ; but here we were met by absolutely 

 ice-free water, and had to take to the ice-foot in order to reach the 

 fast ice inside the fjord. But the farther we went up the fjord, 

 the narrower and more rotten became the ice-foot, and at last it 

 suddenly ceased, and left us cut off by steep walls of rock, falling 

 away perpendicularly into the water. We saw that with much 

 trouble we could carry our loads across the cliffs, and down 

 again to the ice-foot on the other side ; but we were afraid that 

 with this warm weather the foot would be impracticable, or even 



