162 
THE SUNLIGHT. 
very powerfully, and the coining day enables us now 
to observe their stupendous effects. This ice-belt, as 
I have sometimes called it, is now twenty-four feet in 
solid thickness by sixty-five in mean width: the second 
or appended ice is thirty-eight feet wide; and the third 
thirty-four feet. All three are ridges of immense ice- 
tables, serried like the granite blocks of a rampart, and 
investing the rocks with a triple circumvallation. We 
know them as the belt-ices. 
“The separation of the true ice-foot from our floe 
was at first a simple interval, which by the recession 
and advance of the tides gave a movement of about six 
feet to our brig. Now, however, the compressed ice 
grinds closely against the ice-foot, rising into inclined 
planes, and freezing so as actually to push our floe 
farther and farther from the shore. The brig has 
already moved twenty-eight feet, without the slightest 
perceptible change in the cradle which imbeds her.” 
I close my notice of these dreary months -with a 
single extract more. It is of the date of February the 
21st. 
“ We have had the sun, for some days, silvering the 
ice between the headlands of the bay; and to day, to¬ 
ward noon, I started out to be the first of my party to 
welcome him back. It -was the longest walk and 
toughest climb that I have had since our imprisonment; 
and scurvy and general debility have made me ‘short 
o’ wind.’ But I managed to attain ihy object. I saw 
him once more; and upon a projecting crag nestled in 
the sunshine. It was like bathing in perfumed water.” 
