166 NEW LAND. 



This episode kept us until eight in the evening, but as it was 

 now light both night and day, this was no great matter. We con- 

 tinued our course westward from point to point, and each time we 

 came to a new one we expected to see a fjord or large sound pene- 

 trating northward. But each time also our hopes were shattered, 

 and we saw only smallish bays walled in by high cliffs, though 

 not so very high either just here, but more so farther west. The 

 formation of the mountains was wild and broken, with jagged 

 ridges from which defiant awl-pointed peaks and pinnacles tossed 

 their heads in the air. But betwixt these tops and peaks rows 

 of valleys or deep clefts cut in, behind which we were unable 

 to descry any mountains. The landscape was thus cut up into 

 a series of isolated aggregations of mountains, which, out towards 

 the coast, formed as it were a narrow border round the plains 

 inland. 



As long as we were inside the sound between ' Hovedoen ' 

 (Main Island) and the mainland the going was tolerable, but it 

 grew heavier and heavier as we went north, and later in the 

 evening we drove for long distances through loose, deceptive, 

 drifted snow, in which the dogs floundered hopelessly. One 

 minute it would bear, and the next let them through into the 

 disgusting, bottomless mass. However, the sledges travelled pretty 

 well, and we had crept quite an incredible distance when, finally, 

 that evening, we pitched our tents up on the ice-foot. Some floes 

 of ice standing on their sides looked so much like old ice that we 

 went to chip some of it off for cooking, but we were deceived ; it 

 had all been formed in the autumn. 



The following day we started afresh in the same distressing 

 condition of things. At midday we stopped and took an 

 altitude. All the way up the fjord there were tracks of bears, 

 crossing and recrossing one another in all directions, and while we 

 were resting, a bear came stealing up towards us. At first it was 

 fairly bold, but at four hundred yards turned tail, and set off as 

 hard as it could go eastward. 



A little later in the afternoon another bear came running out 

 towards us from the ice-foot. He looked ready to burst with 

 curiosity to know what we were, but that he can hardly have 



