342 
WILD NORWAY. 
I have never, in any land, seen anything that can 
at all compare with the vast aggregations of bird-life 
that in July and August throng the “ loomeries ” of 
Spitsbergen. But these bird-cliffs are abandoned early. 
My brother Alfred, who (in 1894) visited the west coast 
only a few weeks later, saw nothing of these sights. 
The rock-birds were then drawing out of the fjords and 
sounds, and by October quit the land altogether. The 
only other remark I shall make is that no human eye 
sees these birds again till the following spring, nor have 
we any precise knowledge of how and where those 
teeming millions pass the winter. Several of the pre¬ 
dominant forms may be said to be peculiar to the Arctic, 
such as, e.g ., the Brunnich’s and Mandt’s guillemots, 
Arctic puffin, little auk, ivory gull, etc. Yet, of them 
all, none, save merely storm-driven stragglers, ever 
appear on European coasts. All the long sunless winter 
they must spend in mid-ocean, amidst the dark wild 
wastes of the north Atlantic. 
The whole raison d’etre, however, of this chapter 
lies in the following extracts from the diaries of my 
friend, Mr. Arnold Pike, who wintered in Spitsbergen in 
1888-89, and to whose exhaustive and elaborate notes, 
kept specially for me, I fear these brief excerpta do but 
scant justice. Many books are nowadays made with 
far less material. 
The original scheme was to pass the winter in 
Storfjord, in the south, where the spring “ walrus¬ 
fishing ” offers the best opportunities; but, the ice 
preventing access to the shore, the course of the 
Seggur , an ordinary Norwegian walrus-fishing sloop 
of some forty tons, was directed northwards, to the 
