THE GLACIERS OF GREENLAND. 93 



bergs of the great glacier which broke up the ice for miles 

 around, at one time producing, directly under their tent, a 

 fissure in the ice on which they had camped for the night. 

 Eepeatedly they were compelled to ferry themselves over 

 the cracks in the ice on the bay by rafts of ice. * 



Kane gives his first impressions of this grand glacier in 

 the following vivid description : 



I will not attempt to do better by florid description, Men 

 only rhapsodize about Niagara and the ocean. My notes speak 

 simply of the ''long, ever-shining line of cliff diminished to a 

 well-pointed wedge in the perspective"; and, again, of "the 

 face of glistening ice, sweeping in a long curve from the low 

 interior, the facets in front intensely illuminated by the sun." 

 But this line of cliff rose in a solid, glassy wall 300 feet above 

 the water-level, with an unknown, unfathomable depth below 

 it ; and its curved face, sixty miles in length from Cape Agas- 

 siz to Cape Forbes, vanished into unknown space at not more 

 than a single day's railroad-travel from the pole. The interior, 

 with which it communicated and from which it issued, was 

 an unsurveyed mer cle glace — an ice-ocean, to the eye, of bound- 

 less dimensions. 



It was in full sight — the mighty crystal bridge which con- 

 nects the two continents of America and Greenland. I say 

 continents ; for Greenland, however insulated it may ulti- 

 mately prove to be, is in mass strictly continental. Its least 

 possible axis, measured from Cape Farewell to the line of this 

 glacier, in the neighborhood of the eightieth parallel, gives a 

 length of more than 1,200 miles, not materially less than that 

 of Australia from its northern to its southern cape. 



Imagine, now, the center of such a continent, occupied 

 through nearly its whole extent by a deep, unbroken sea of 

 ice that gathers perennial increase from the water-shed of vast 

 snow-covered mountains and all the precipitations of its atmos- 

 phere upon its own surface. Imagine this, moving onward 

 like a great glacial river, seeking outlets at every fiord and 

 valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and Greenland 



* "Arctic Explorations/' vol. i, p. 135. 



