GREENLAND BY THE POLAR SEA 



drove into the narrow inlet between land and the tall Stephenson 

 Island, impressive with its steep, exclusive mountains, the 

 inmost regions of which are covered by local glaciers. 



We set off in the evening, and in quiet, beautiful sunshine 

 we struggled inland, taking turns at leading. Bosun, a boy 

 not yet twenty years old, had repeatedly shown a surprising 

 capacity for endurance ; he had a healthy, even temperament 

 and did not seem susceptible to any kind of adversity, if only 

 he could get somewhere near the rations which his young 

 muscles demanded. He enjoyed his meals very much, and occa- 

 sionally surprised us with his voracious appetite. 



A rather large island behind Stephenson Island is marked on 

 the map, but it proved to be non-existent. Twenty-five kilo- 

 metres into Victoria Fjord we got the view which we were in 

 search of, and drove into a bay to the west of the big island, look- 

 ing for a place suitable for a camp, so that the dogs might rest 

 while we, in snowshoes, continued further inland. 



We ascended the mountains immediately, and found to our 

 surprise that this fjord, which had previously been described as an 

 enormous arm of the ocean, so deep that one could not even dis- 

 cern the land at its head, is hardly more than 80 kilometres in 

 length. The head of the fjord ends in a broad glacier which, 

 faintly sloping, merges into the inland-ice itself. The great 

 stretches of surrounding land, which the old map promised we 

 should find here, do not exist. Far to the north-east we found 

 land, but it consisted only of steep, glaciated mountains, stand- 

 ing like narrow walls with their backs clean against the inland- 

 ice. Also to the south-west we saw far inland a steep alpine 

 landscape with occasional broad doughs, but the entrance to this 

 was blocked, as the inner reaches of the fjord consisted of floating 

 inland-ice, slowly moving outward, so that trackless ravines were 

 apparent not very far from our look-out. 



This fjord, from which we had expected so much, proved to 

 possess none of the means of subsistence necessary for the accom- 

 plishment of our scientific work. Hunting in this country would 

 be both dangerous and futile. We could only hope for better 

 conditions round Nordenskjold Fjord. We discerned moun- 

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