of Edinburgh^ Session 1865 - 66 . 553 
Behind the hamlet the ground slopes up to a point about 250 feet 
above the sea, beyond which lies the mouth of a valley that runs 
up into the heart of the mountains. We climbed the terraced 
slope leading to this recess, and found that the lower half of the 
valley is occupied by a lake about a mile long, and said to be 30 
fathoms deep. It lies in a rock basin, and the rocks around its 
margin show that they have been powerfully abraded by ice. We were 
told that three weeks before our visit this lake was solidly frozen 
over ; great sheets of snow, indeed, still descended to the water’s 
edge, and were melting away under the glare of a fierce July sun. 
At the far end of the valley mounds of angular rubbish, cumbered 
with huge blocks of stone, stretched from side to side, while over- 
head two glaciers came out of the edge of the snow-field, and hung 
down the steep mountain side — the longer one almost reaching the 
bottom of the valley. Here, too, the ice was ever breaking up and 
crashing down the precipices in clouds of snowy dust. The debris 
of ice gathered into talus heaps below, like the cones de dejection at 
the foot of a winter torrent. 
From Bergsfjord we continued our boating voyage down the 
fjord, and found fresh proofs that a vast body of ice, descending 
from the lofty Jokuls Fjeld, had moved northwards along the 
length of the inlet. Every promontory was beautifully smoothed 
and polished ; while the grooves and striae slanted up and over the 
projecting bosses of rock, as they do in Loch Fyne and the other 
western sea-lochs of Scotland. Bound the headland at the mouth 
of the Bergs Fjord we turned eastward, and soon passed the mouth 
of the Ulfjord. We could see that, at the far end of that inlet, the 
snow of the great table-land moves outward to the edge of the dark 
precipices which encircle the Ulfjord, and actually forms on the 
crest of these precipices a white cliff, from which, of course, ava- 
lanches are constantly falling. Yet the under part of this snowy 
cliff is not snow, but ice, as shown by its blue colour contrasting 
with the whiteness of the upper layer, which is snow. At the foot 
of the precipice a glacier, derived probably in part, like that of 
Jokul’s Fjord, from the ice-falls from above, creeps towards, but 
does not reach, the bottom of the valley. Continuing our eastward 
journey we saw the same terraces still skirting the hill sides, now as 
green platforms of detritus loaded with angular blocks, and now as 
