370 NEW LAND. 



feet high and of no great extent, and may, perhaps, best be 

 described as fragments of calf-ice. 



In some places we had great difficulty in making our way, 

 often for long distances together ; and once or twice were even 

 obliged to take to the ice-foot. But the ice-foot itself was, as a rule, 

 impassable, and we pressed on as best we could out on the sea-ice. 

 The work we got through that day was something calculated to try 

 our mettle. What gave us most trouble were the innumerable 

 drifts of enormous size, filled with pitfalls. The pressure-ridges on 

 land were still very high, ancr, on the whole, considerably larger 

 than those we had seen the previous day, some of them being, I 

 should think, as much as seventy or eighty feet in height. 



Later in the afternoon we got down on to ancient ice, which 

 was blue and slippery, but terribly uneven, so that, in spite 

 of its undeniable good qualities, we were not able to make great 

 progress, as the dogs were unable to go quickly on it. This ice 

 was probably very old. If polar ice lie till a second year it begins, 

 in places, to resemble freshwater ice on the surface ; while, if it be 

 several years old, the upper parts, to all intents and purposes, 

 become freshwater ice. Chemically free from salt, of course, it is 

 not, but there is so little remaining in it as to be unappreciable to 

 the taste, and we never hesitated to use it for cooking purposes. 



We were stopped during the afternoon by a small accident 

 the nails in the bed of Isachsen's sledge came out, and in so 

 doing loosened the plate on one of the runners. Later on we 

 drove across a bay covered with young ice, which was slippery 

 and even, and here we made good progress. It brought us under 

 the highest walls of rock we had yet seen in these parts, a height of 

 at least 3000 feet. Under this mountain an enormously high 

 perpendicular wall of ice had been pressed up, close to which we 

 encamped, in order to get a little shelter from the wind, which had 

 now gone round to the north-east. Close under the wall we did not 

 feel much of it, but when we craned back our heads, and looked up, 

 we could see the wind on the mountains blowing up large clouds 

 of snow, and whirling them in wanton, fleeting eddies among the 

 crags and peaks. We had long talked of measuring this wall of 

 ice, which lay pressed up all the way beside the land, but the 



