ICE-MASSES. 
289 
"12 M. The thermometer keeps steadily at —20°, 
but to-day is the coldest I have ever felt. It blows a 
young gale. Brooks and myself have been flying 
kites. The wind was like prickling needles, and the 
snow smoked over the moving drifts. 
" I am struck more and more with the evidences of 
gigantic force in the phases of our frozen pedragal. 
Returning from a chase after an imaginary bear, we 
came across, yesterday, a suspended hummock, so im- 
posing in its form, that, half frozen as we were, we 
stopped to measure it. It was a single table of mass- 
ive ice, supported upon a pile of rubbish, and inclined 
about 15° to the horizon. Its length was ninety-one 
feet six inches, its breadth fifty-one feet, and its aver- 
age solid thickness eight feet. At its lower end it 
was seven feet above the level of the adjacent floe; at 
its upper, twenty-seven. The weight of such a mass, 
allowing 113 lbs. to the cubic foot, would be 1883 tons. 
I almost begin to realize Baron Wrangell's account of 
the hummocks on the coast of Siberia. We have here, 
perhaps, some five hundred fathoms of water : the six, 
or twelve, or twenty fathoms of slimy mud, that he 
speaks of as forming the inclined plane of the shore, 
must facilitate very much the upheaval of ice-tables. 
" 10 P.M. The wind has freshened to a gale of the 
first order, and it howls outside like the dog-chorus of 
outer Constantinople. But cheerless as these heavy 
winds are in all out-of-the-way, undefended places, it 
is only when they announce or accompany a change 
of direction that we fear them. So stable and so elas- 
tic withal is the cementing effect of the cold here, that 
the strongest gales do not break up the ice after it has 
been once set in the line of the wind. On the other- 
hand, a trifling breeze, if it deviates a very few points 
T 
