A LOOK-OUT. 
2G!) 
tains were to us like the look-out hills of men at home, 
—and surveyed the ice to the south far on toward Cape 
York. My eyes never looked on a spectacle more 
painful. We were in advance of the season: the floes 
had not broken up. There was no “western water.” 
Here, in a cul-de-sac, between two barriers, both impas¬ 
sable to men in our condition, with stores miserably 
inadequate and strength broken down, we were to wait 
till the tardy summer should open to us a way. 
I headed for the cliffs. Desolate and frowning as they 
were, it was better to reach them and halt upon the 
inhospitable shore than await the fruitless ventures of 
the sea. A narrow lead, a mere fissure at the edge of 
the land-ice, ended opposite a low platform: we had 
traced its whole extent, and it landed us close under 
the shadow of the precipitous shore. 
My sketch intended to represent this wild locality, 
like that of the “Weary Man’s Rest,” gives a very 
imperfect idea of the scene. 
Where the cape lies directly open to the swell of the 
northwest winds, at the base of a lofty precipice there 
was left still clinging to the rock a fragment of the 
winter ice-belt not more than five feet wide. The tides 
rose over it and the waves washed against it continually, 
but it gave a perfectly safe perch to our little boats. 
Above, cliff seemed to pile over cliff, until in the high 
distance the rocks looked like the overlapping scales 
of ancient armor. They were at least eleven hundred 
feet high, their summits generally lost in fog and mist; 
and all the way up we seemed to see the birds whose 
