THE BEACH IN WINTER 87 



smooth and as free from snow and ice as in mid- 

 summer, and the ice-wall at its upper edge makes 

 a surprising picture, but the wall is most beauti- 

 ful when the beach is sealed by an icy coating, 

 and the waves build up the wall undefiled by 

 sand. 



On one memorable day in midwinter I was at 

 the beach alone and had taken off my snowshoes 

 in order to climb down the wall on to the beach. 

 I found the snowshoes, which are four feet long, 

 useful in the photographs I was taking to give 

 an idea of the height of the wall. Without 

 some measure of comparison, a photograph of a 

 wall a foot high may appear ten times that 

 height, and in the same way a wall of ten feet 

 may appear in a photograph to be onh' 

 a foot high. I have seen a photograph 

 taken of a small cake of floe-ice from 

 the distance of a few feet produce the im- 

 pression on the beholder of an iceberg half a 

 mile away. I was so busy photographing the 

 ice-wall that I had not noticed the rising tide 

 whose waves were almost stilled by their coating 

 of slob ice. With each throb of the sea the 



