204 
AN ARCTIC SCENE. 
Sound, speaks of the cliffs as shrouded in great sheets of drifting 
snow, which rolled over the slopes, and swept down every gorge and 
valley. Whirlwinds lifted it up from the white hill-tops, and drove 
it through the air in skurrying storms of blinding, dazzling spray. 
A glacier hurled its frozen mass through a yawning ravine covered 
with a curtain of "revolving whiteness." As the bold explorer 
penetrated into the dark channel, the sun sank beneath a black 
and ominous horizon. Seaward the aspect of Nature was singularly 
sombre. Off each bold headland the wild waters were lashed into 
a weltering mass of foam. On the air were borne shrieks and 
lamentations, dreary and loud as those of the impetuous blast which, 
down in the second circle of the Inferno, appalled the imagination 
of Dante ; and clouds of snow and vapour were tossed upon the gale, 
like the condemned souls upon that tyrannous gust : — 
" Bellowing there groaned 
A noise, as of a sea in tenapest torn 
By warring winds. The stormy blast of hell 
With, restless fury drives the spirits on." 
It is in such localities as these that the auks, and gulls, and guillemots 
are found in countless numbers, hurrying northward when the genial 
influence of spring spreads beyond the Arctic Circle. Then it is that 
the cliffs are white with the wings of auks, which have left the warm 
Southern lands for colder shores. Then it is that squadrons of eider- 
ducks, in admirable array, steer stately into the water-channels that 
have broken up the fields of ice. Then it is that burgomaster-guUs 
and gyrfalcons roam to and fro in quest of food ; that the snipe's 
repeated cry echoes from the inland pool ; that long lines of cackling 
geese sail onward to the remotest recesses of the Polar Sea. 
In the neighbourhood of the "Sanderson's Hope" of the old 
navigator, John Davis, and of Mount Krekarsoak, one of the loftiest 
peaks of the "Land of Desolation," Dr. Hayes came upon a haunt 
of sea-birds which must needs be described. An immense pi-ecipitous 
cliff, towering, like a wall of shining silver, 2600 feet above the 
