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 
regions 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 Bay, 
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 ice, while 
the same substance covers to a great extent the sur- 
* Scoresby. 
