234 DESCRIPTION or GREENLAND. 



with nothing on the road but reindeer. He was, however, 

 surprised to see at the top of one of these mountains, and a 

 league from the sea, a little mast of a vessel, to which was 

 attached a pulley at one end ; and when he asked his sailors 

 Avliom he had brought with him who had brought it there, 

 they told him they did not know, and they had always seen 

 it there. It is probable that the sea washed formerly near 

 this mountain, and that it was the remainder of some ship- 

 wreck. There are meadows in this part, but the grass is so 

 short that it can scarcely be discovered from the land or from 

 the stones ; for, properly speaking, this land has no earth, 

 but is composed of little stones, between which and this 

 small grass sjjrings up a kind of moss, like that which groM^s 

 on the trees in our climate, on which the reindeer of this 

 country feed and become so fat, that the Grand Master 

 brought some of them which had four fingers' breadth of fat. 

 This country neither is nor can be inhabited on account of 

 the cold ; for although the sun does not set at all for four 

 months, and during six weeks of that time does not descend 

 Avithin three ells of the horizon (speaking in the Danish 

 fashion and conformably M-ith Virgil's measurement of the 

 heavens) ; that is to say, although at the midnight, if one 

 may so speak, of that country the sun for six weeks does not 

 aj^proach in its descent lower than within about nine or 

 eleven and a half degrees of the horizon, yet, for all that, the 

 clearer and brighter the sun is, the colder it is. It is impos- 

 sible to live near these mountains, for they have no solidity, 

 and there exhales from them so cold a vapour that one is 

 frozen, however short a time one stays there. To guard 

 against this severity, it is better to go where the sun shines 

 on all sides. 



There are great numbers of bears in this country, but they 

 are all white, and much fonder of the water than the land. 

 They are found in the open sea, swimming and climbing upon 

 large pieces of itc. The Grand Master got some live ones 



