30 THE INTERIOR. ICE-FIELD OF GREENLAND. 



these islands, or outskirting land, that the population of Greenland 

 lives, and the Danish trading-posts are built— all the rest of the 

 country, with the exception of this island circlet, being an icy, 

 landless, sea-like waste of glacier, which can be seen here and 

 there peeping out in the distance. On some of the large and more 

 mountainous islands, as might be expected in such a climate, there 

 are small independent glaciers, in many cases coming down to the 

 sea, and there discharging icebergs ; but these glaciers are of little 

 importance, and have no connection with the great internal ice-cover- 

 ing of the country. I have called the land circling this interior 

 ice desert " a collection of islands," because though many of them 

 are joined together by glaciers, and only a few are wholly insulated 

 by water, many of them (indeed, the majority) are bounded on 

 their eastern side by this internal inland ice ; yet, whether bounded 

 by water or by ice, the boundary is perpetual, and whatever be the 

 insulating medium, they are to all intents and purposes islands. 



1. The Interior Ice-field. — This is well known to the Danes in 

 Greenland by the name of the " inlands iis," and though a familiar 

 subject of talk amongst them from the earliest times, it is only a 

 very few of the " colonists " who have ever reached it. The natives 

 everywhere have a great horror of penetrating into the interior, not 

 only on account of the dangers of ice-travel, but from a super- 

 stitious notion that the interior is inhabited by evil spirits in the 

 shape of all sorts of monsters. 



Crossing over the comparatively narrow strip of land, the 

 traveller comes to this great inland ice (fig. 1, a). If the termina- 

 tion of it is at the sea, its face looks like a great ice wall : indeed 

 the Eskimo called it the Sermik soak, which means this exactly. 

 The height of this icy face varies according to the depth of the 

 valley or fjord which it fills. If the valley is shallow the height is 

 low ; if, on the contrary, it is a deep glen, then the sea-face of the 

 glacier in the fjord is lofty. From 1000 to 3000 feet is not un- 

 common. In such situations the face is always steep, because bergs 

 are continually breaking off from it; and in such situations it is 

 not only dangerous to approach it, on account of the ice falling, or 

 the wave caused by the displacement of the water, but from the 

 great steepness of the face it is rarely possible to get on to it in 

 such situations. 1 In such places Dr. Eink has generally found 

 that it rises by a gradual slope to the general level plateau beyond. 2 



1 The " great glacier " of Humboldt is merely such an exposed glacier-face, 

 though of gnat extent. 



2 Kane speaks about the " escaladed structure " of the Greenland glacier 

 ('Arctic Explorations ' [American ed.], vol. ii. p. 284). This phrase seems to 



