SNOW ICE. 
97 
ing our pathway, it could he traversed on foot, it was 
irregular and unsafe. It cracked readily before the 
wedge-action of our hows. 
A third variety of ice was the honey-comhed or cel- 
lulai', seen beneath the surface in crude, olive-green 
masses. This ice, though generally very tenacious, 
was sometimes so soft that you could plunge a boat- 
hook through it. It resembled a grossly-cellular Par- 
mesan cheese. 
A fourth was as finely granulated as loaf-sugar, yet 
as tough as whitleather. Al- 
though thoroughly permeated 
with water, it was as unyielding 
as asphalt. We were often help- 
lessly impacted in its insidious 
rottenness. It would neither 
fracture nor give. A cutting instrument pierced it 
like a cork, leaving a merely local puncture, and it 
differed so little in specific gravity from the water as 
to remain almost suspended. 
But the surface of all this diversity was mantled 
over by the leading feature of our prospect, snow ; not 
snow as at home, with rounded hill slope and gestic- 
ulating tree, but a surface deprived of all variety save 
such as resides in itself. This is not so scanty as one 
might at first suppose, for it rises into hummocks, which 
impress their shadows on the ice ; it thaws, and black 
pools eat themselves into its level wastes ; it freezes 
again, and bright silver streaks run like metal rivers 
along the leads. The winds, too, which drive into one 
this great mass of floating fields, leave here and there 
little areas protected by icy edges. These lake-like 
pools are haunts of the seal and the diver. I have 
often observed the white lip of the snow at the mar- 
gin of them reflected in the water of a marked claret 
G 
