118 THE OCEAN. 



Danish navigators, which caused no little astonish- 

 ment, may be readily accounted for. He had made 

 the eastern coast of Greenland, and had been sailing 

 towards it for many hours with a fair wind ; but see- 

 ing that the land seemed to be no nearer, he became 

 alarmed, and immediately shifted his course back to 

 Denmark, attributing the failure of his voyage to 

 the influence of loadstone rocks, hidden beneath the 

 sea, which arrested the progress of his vessel. 



The peculiar stratification of the rocks in these 

 regio.is often causes them to assume a walled or cas- 

 tellated appearance, the angles being as sharp and 

 clean as if cut with a mason's tool. Some of their 

 forms resemble so strongly the works of art, that one 

 can scarcely believe them to be freaks of nature. A 

 magnificent instance of such regularity occurs on the 

 coast of Spitzbergen. Near the head of King's Ba}', 

 there are seen, far inland, three piles of rock of 

 regular shape, well known to the whalers by the ap- 

 pellation of the Three Crowns. " They rest on the 

 top of the ordinary mountains, each commencing 

 with a square table, or horizontal stratum of rock, 

 on the top of which is another, of similar form and 

 height, but of a smaller area; this is continued by 

 a third, and a fourth, and so on, each succeeding 

 stratum being less than the next below it, until it 

 forms a pyramid of steps, almost as regular to ap- 

 pearance as if worked by art."'* 



The most prominent object in these dreary seas is 

 ice. Even on the land, a large portion of the ground 

 is concealed by perpetually-accumulating i<v, while 

 the same substance covers to a great extent the sur- 



* Scoresby. 





