WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 223 



crisp, glittering, sunlit beds of icicles set in blue, level as a 

 mat, tumbling into glittering fragments as we crunched 

 across. But our trail was all in vain ; from blocks and 

 hummocks we spied the plains and could not find our bears. 

 They had made a wide circuit, gone down wind, and got ours, 

 I expect, and had gone clean away, and as the floe was, say, 

 twenty miles across and all over hummocks, they were soon 

 lost to sight, even from the mast-head. 



Coming back at leisure we had more time to enjoy the 

 warm sun and the colouring. There were three distinct 

 blues. Behind our little white ship at the floe-edge the sea 

 glittered deep blue, like Oxford blue ; on the floe between 

 us and the ship there was spread a wide pond of shallow 

 water, lighter than Cambridge blue, and the pigeon-grey sky 

 showed patches of light peacock-blue. 



A change of clothes, a redressed foot by Captain Svendsen 

 one of the lightest handed surgeons I have met and some 

 bear-steak and we started steaming round the floe, pretty 

 sure of getting our glasses on to the bears before many hours 

 were past. For hours we watched with glasses and tele- 

 scope from the bridge and crow's nest the passing white and 

 grey plains and snowy fantastic rock scenes till we almost 

 slept with the continual concentration of the eye on the 

 moving white scene. But alas, at five P.M., the mist came 

 down again, so again we put our ship's nose against the ice- 

 floe and we pray now that the mist may lift. The skipper 

 and Gisbert took advantage of this pause to make an Artificial 

 horizon with tar in a plate, and tried to find our position by 

 same with sun on the tar surface. But the tar congealed off 

 the level, and after calculations in decimals, yards in length, 

 we find our position is two hundred miles inside the north- 

 east coast of Greenland ! 



Before midnight, with the sun still high above the horizon, 

 the mist lifted and again we go plodding round another huge 

 floe. We cannot get west yet, enormous floes bar our way, 

 there is a narrow passage, say two hundred yards wide, to 

 west between two counties of ice, but it is too narrow for us 

 to venture through. Should the floes close we would be 

 imprisoned before we had time to retreat. 



