51 



terminus of the Gulf Stream. There was little floating ice, it was 

 too late in the season. A couple of whaling boats, a steamer 

 come to get coal from a mine recently opened which has remark- 

 ably good, hard coal, and, on the land, the mining buildings and 

 one or two houses for the workmen, and a shanty put up for the 

 occasional hunter, were the only signs of life in this great arena 

 of dazzling snow, black rocks, and blue water. We brought with 

 us the best day the isolated men had had for the year, and our 

 pilot, a whaler of forty years experience, declared the bay was 

 more open and the seas quieter than he had ever known them. 



Fig. 3. Merok, in the Geirangerfiord, Norway. The tree is a white birch, and 

 there are plenty of flowers and grass and other birches part way up the mountains, 

 which are perhaps 4,000 feet high. 



We went ashore merely to say we had set foot on Spitzbergen, 

 and wondered why otherwise we took the trouble, it looked so 

 uninteresting. At the point where we landed there was a plateau 

 of great extent about six feet above the level of the shingle 

 beach, and composed of flat stones, probably left by a retreating 

 glacier; what had looked lil<e a barren field of rock proved to be 



