THE ICE-MARS 11 ES. 
232 
cut, ten, fifteen, or even thirty feet long, and along this 
the sledges were to he pushed and guided b} r bars and 
levers with painful labor. These are light things, as I 
refer to them here; but in our circumstances, at the 
time I write of, when the breaking of a stick of timber 
was an irreparable harm, and the delay of a day 
involved the peril of life, they were grave enough. 
Even on the floes the axe was often indispensable to 
carve our path through the hummocks; and many a 
weary and anxious hour have I looked on and toiled 
ICE-MARSHES. 
while the sledges were waiting for the way to open. 
Sometimes too, both on the land-ice and on the belt, 
we encountered heavy snow-drifts, which were to be 
shovelled away before we could get along; and within 
an hour afterward, or perhaps even at. the bottom of 
the drift, one of the sledge-runners would cut through 
to the water. 
It was saddening to our poor fellows, when we were 
forced to leave the ice-belt and push out into the open 
field, to look ahead at the salt ice-marshes, as they called 
them, studded with black pools, with only a white 
