THE WHITE WORLD 



horizon to obstruct our view. We were looking out 

 upon the same snow fields which had greeted our vision 

 from Isortok Fiord two weeks before, only now we were 

 on the field itself. Then we had viewed it from the side, 

 at right angles to our present vision. The imagination 

 now came in, with its subtle power, to intensify the inter- 

 est of the occasion. With the mind's eye there was nothing 

 to hinder our looking across the whole vast waste of per- 

 petual snow stretching to the east coast of Greenland. 

 This was verily a part of the inland ice. 



Nor was the interest of the backward glance much less 

 impressive. The glacier at the head of Ikamiut Fiord was 

 only half of what was within our vision. The mountain 

 upon the south side, whose hanging glaciers had so en- 

 chanted our vision from our camping-place, divided the 

 glacier we were exploring into two nearly equal portions. 

 One half was pouring into the fiord on the south, through 

 whose long vista we could distinctly see the distant islands 

 in the bay of Sukkertoppen. At various distances along 

 this fiord icebergs glittered in the light of the declining 

 sun, showing that the ice front at the head of that fiord 

 was similar to that in the one which we had more particu- 

 larly examined. 



As before remarked, these glaciers on the south side 

 were all of them thicker near the base of the mountain 

 than at their higher levels. Indeed, they seemed to run 

 down like cold tar and to thicken at the base as a stiff 

 semi-fluid would under the action of gravity. Usually the 

 more rapid melting at the lower levels causes the glacier 

 to thin out near the foot, but here the temperature in the 

 shade is so near the freezing point that the ice melts 

 about as fast near the upper portions of the glaciers as 

 it does at the base. 



Another phenomenon illustrating the nature of the 

 movement going on in great glaciers was seen here to 

 special advantage. Where the great ice sheet abutted 

 against the mountain which divided its front into two 

 portions, it was pushed up by the momentum of the move- 

 ment so as to be two or three hundred feet higher at the 

 base of the mountain than it was a mile away. Indeed, 

 a half mile or so back there was a distinct depression 



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