Absorbed by vague thoughts, my looks mechanically tend towards the open sea, hoping to descry a sail coming to call on us and bring us news from home. But the horizon is bare, except that here and there a few icebergs are floating on the waves.
All around us, mountains, barren rocks, snow, and glaciers; no vegetation to gladden our sight, nothing but a few varieties of moss bearing tiny white, violet, and yellow flowers; the yellow ones, larger than the rest, resemble very much the butter-cups, with which our meadows are dotted in spring. The flora is excessively poor in these icy regions. What a contrast to the luxuriant vegetation of Brazil, the rich and prolific nature of which country I was admiring three years ago, being then engaged on a mission on behalf of the Brazilian Military Authorities!
ON THE TOP OF THE BALLOON.
In order to overcome the melancholy which seems to come over me to-night, I am glad to start with Fraenkel on a boating excursion. We take some provisions with us, and at nine o’clock we set off hap-hazard, in glorious sunshine. We shoot some birds, chiefly eider-geese. Near the Albert Isle, in the Smeerenburg, a group of seals, disporting themselves on the ice, attracts our attention. It is impossible to get near them by water; we therefore alight and drag our boat up on to the ice. But the wary animals plunge under as soon as we approach. It is no use waiting for them over their holes, as the seal will travel a long way under water, in order to re-emerge some hundreds of yards away from the place where it dives. It then proceeds to make a fresh hole; with its breath alone, emitted and inhaled repeatedly, it can pierce masses of this ice, measuring at least a yard in thickness.
Not far from the place where the seals disappeared, there is an opening free from ice; we decide, at all events, to wait some minutes on the brink of this pond. Two of the seals appear, and are at once greeted by us with bullets; the water is dyed red with blood over a large expanse, but the two animals, though wounded in the head, have strength enough left to dive under the ice, there to die.
Baffled in this attempt, we return to our boat and continue our trip in the Smeerenburg in a south-easterly direction; we wish to reach the glaciers haunted by bears, but a thick fog surprises us on our way and stops our progress. We have no compass; in order to get back and avoid losing ourselves in the fog we are obliged to follow the coast-line, which considerably increases the distance to be covered. Objects are beginning to assume fantastic forms in the fog. At one part of the coast which I know perfectly well, having roamed over it several times, a rock of from sixteen to nineteen feet high appears to us a mountain of respectable dimensions; further on, the ice round the coast is about six feet above the water, and this looks to us like a colossal glacier; then we come across some eider-geese, which animals seem to assume awful dimensions, appearing to us about thirty-two feet high. Finally, becoming more and more subject to these curious effects of optical illusion, taking small blocks of ice for enormous icebergs, we imagine we can identify a walrus in a moving mass which appears to be the size of a small whale: we approach the animal, whose true nature we recognise when its size still appears to be thirteen or sixteen feet—it is a small bird of the size of a pigeon.
After several hours of a dispiriting journey made in the damp and penetrating cold, tossed to and fro by the waves, which have become very rough, while the water, lashed by a contrary wind, is constantly dashing in our faces, we arrive near Virgo Bay at the very moment when the fog commences to clear, and with it these phantasmagoric effects gradually disappear.