BERGS. 
103 
or " the fast." Against this margin, the great " drift" 
through which we had heen passing exerts a remitting 
action, receding sometimes under the influence of wind 
and currents so as to open a tortuous and uncertain 
canal along its edge, at others closing against it in a 
harrier of contending floes and hergs. 
Our initiation into the mysteries of this region was 
ominous enough. It hlew a gale. The offing was a 
scene of noisy contention, ohscured by a dense fog, 
through which rose the tops of the icebergs as they 
drifted by us. Twice in the night we were called up 
to escape these bergs by warping out of their path. 
Imagine a mass as large as the Parthenon bearing 
down upon you before a storm- wind ! 
The immediate site of our anchorage was about 
eighteen miles from the Black Hills, which rose above 
the glacier. It was truly an iron-bound coast, bergs, 
floes, and hummock ridges, in all the disarray of win- 
tery conflict, cemented in a basis of ice ten feet thick, 
and lashed by an angry sea. It was the first time I 
had witnessed the stupendous results of ice action. I 
went out with Captain De Haven to observe them, 
more closely. The hummocks had piled themselves 
at the edges of the floes in a set of rugged walls, some- 
times twenty feet high ; and here and there were ice- 
bergs firmly incorporated in the vast plain. Our at- 
tention was of course directed more anxiously to those 
which were drifting at large upon the open water ; but 
we could not help being impressed by the solid majes- 
ty of these stationary mountains. The height of one 
of them, measured by the sextant, was two hundred 
and forty feet. 
It was the motion of the floating bergs that sur- 
rounded us at this time, which first gave me the idea 
