From this interesting digression we must return to our own doings. Facing south-east we kept along the crest of the highest ground and made quick progress, for a gentle slope drooped in our favour and the surface of the snow was in perfect condition for both ski and sledges. Garwood and I shall ever remember the delight of this midnight march. High above the clear air that surrounded us was a dark-blue roof of soft cloud, resting on skyey walls of marvellous colours, with streaks of stratus across them, reflecting the golden sunlight. The sun itself was hidden in the north, but beneath it hung a reticulated web, woven of gold and Tyrian purple, through which shafts of tender light drooped down like eyelashes upon the snow. All around, the névé went sweeping away in gentle curves and domes, greyish-white in some places with purple shadows, bluish-grey in others, here and there strewn with carpets of sunlight. The rocks, too, wherever they appeared, were rich in colour, showing their own ruddy or orange tints enforced by the lustrous atmosphere. There was none of the sharp contrast of black and white that strikes a superficial observer in high mountain views. This panorama was a glorious mass of colour, harmonious without rift and rich without monotony. Just at midnight the cloud-roof opened in the north and a flood of sunshine fell around and upon us—a veritable transfiguration and thrilling glory which cannot be told. Entranced with beauty, we marched on and on over the wide snowfield, with a sense of boundless space, a feeling of freedom, a joy as in the ownership of the whole universe—emotions that, in my experience, only arise in the great clean places of the earth, where nothing lives and nothing grows, the great deserts and the wide snowfields. Green country, after such regions, is land soiled by mildew.
Coming, in about seven miles march, to the point where the slope down to the Nordenskiöld Glacier began to steepen, we halted, not from fatigue, but because we were loath to quit the far-seeing uplands and wall ourselves in between a valley’s sides. So we pitched the camp about 3 A.M., with the doors opening to the south. The eastward views were better displayed than before. We could see Wybe Jans Water with Barents Land beyond, then a series of long rock-faces supporting high-domed, snowy plateaus, stretching round to the Terrier on the left side of the Nordenskiöld Glacier, whilst De Geer Peak came last, looking from this point like a pyramid with its top storey horizontally stratified. The low sun shone golden on the snowfield, casting blue shadows. All round, near the horizon, the sky was clear below the soft, thin cloud-roof, through which the blueness of the vault of heaven was plainly seen. The remote hills were indigo, patched with orange, gold, and pink. White mists lay in hollows of the snow, motionless. Ivory gulls flew about, projecting their silver plumage against the blue shadows. The air was still. Not a sound broke the perfection of the silence.
It was afternoon of the 19th when we set forward again over the good, hard snow, the still air seeming warm, and the sun shining softly behind a thin grey roof of cloud. All round was a light-blue frieze of sky with cloud-flakes in lines below, and then the faint blue-and-white hills. In the south the burnished surface of Klaas Billen Bay, shining between purple shores, reflected the sunlight. The beauty of the scene sapped our energies. We wanted to look at it, not to haul sledges. But Svensen said he could do no work, so hauling was the order of our day. Needless to say that many halts were made on every kind of excuse, and every halt was celebrated by the smoke of pipes. Garwood took the opportunity to instruct me in the true art of pipe-loading. “Jam the tobacco in as tight as you can, and then loosen it with a corkscrew” is his formula. I am witness to the labour it cost him in practice, and the tenacity of his adherence to an adopted principle. One advantage of travelling with sledges is that you always have comfortable seats ready. It would have been a sin, at least a folly, not to avail ourselves of them. We were neither sinners nor fools after this kind. Yet on the whole good progress was made, for we walked fast and kept going for many hours. The view scarcely changed. That we were coming to lower levels was obvious, but the hills in front seemed no nearer after three hours’ marching than at the start. Ahead were a few rocks emerging from the glacier. We thought them close at hand, but they kept their distance. Not for five hours were they left behind. The actual motion, however, was pleasant; ski and sledges often ran of themselves. Only Nielsen was miserable with his Canadian snowshoes, and perforce lagged behind. “This,” he said, “is the worst thing ever a man put on his feet—miserables!” His own Lapp shoes, too, gave him no satisfaction. Melted snow found a way through them. “They should have been soaked,” he said, “with two parts Stockholm tar and three parts cod-liver oil, boiled together and put on hot. It should be rubbed well in with a rag while it’s hot. That will make boots waterproof and keep them soft for three months in spite of wettings. That is what our Norwegian fishermen use.” Mr. Frederick Jackson, however, tells me that he tried this composition and found it no better than patent dubbin.
A flat plain followed a long and steady descent. Here, at a level of about 1300 feet, the snow began to be bad. A foot of new snow lay upon the ice. It was in places waterlogged, for there were no open crevasses, and now the sun had attained power to set things thawing fast. The blue lakes we saw when coming up existed no more; drifted snow and frost had abolished them altogether. We were well below our camping place at the foot of Mount De Geer, but on the opposite side of the glacier, approaching its left bank. A wide water-channel came, with a rushing torrent in it, flowing over blue ice between banks of snow. It was long before we found an overhanging place where a leap would take a man from bank to bank. Thence a flat but watery area intervened before our goal was reached at the extreme left of the glacier and right below the highest point of the long Terrier ridge, to the summit of which we intended to climb next day. Its cliffs were loud with the sound of countless birds, whose full-throated cries, mingled together and wafted afar as a raucous hum, were audible long before a bird came in sight. From camp we could see them in their thousands, perched in rows upon ledges or soaring about the cliff—fulmars, little auks, and glaucus gulls. Their feathers were scattered all about, whilst numerous tracks showed that this breeding-place was no secret to the foxes—the only animals that rove over the icy interior of Spitsbergen.
Our projected climb was not to be made, for rain came on in the night. We awoke (20th) to find clouds heavy upon us, and all but the Terrier’s foundations obliterated. It was a disappointment, but there were compensations, for the immediate neighbourhood proved unexpectedly interesting. This discovered, we loaded the sledges and sent them down with the men, under orders not to stop till they reached Klaas Billen Bay. Svensen had no longer any excuse for malingering. Yesterday, with every hour’s advance, his face became rounder, his back straighter, his movements more active. The fear of destruction was in reality his main disease, aggravated no doubt by cold and exposure to the storm. He acknowledged as much later on. The suggestion that he should hasten down to the bay, whether dragging a sledge or not, seemed nothing less than a reprieve from sentence of death. He set off with alacrity.
Garwood had observed a curious piece of glacier a few hundred yards away from camp. It was mounded in a peculiar manner, calling for investigation. On approaching it, the mounds were perceived to be arches of ice, barrel vaults perfectly regular in form. Their origin was presently self-explained. A wide and deep stream of surface drainage-water habitually flows near the foot of the Terrier. Reaching a level place, the speed of flow is reduced so that the surface becomes frozen over in cold weather. Snow falls upon the ice thus formed, and a roof is made, the remains of which, even at this advanced period of the summer, were two feet thick or more. The glacier in its onward movement is compressed between the Terrier and the De Geer range opposite, and every portion of it feels this compression, which, operating on the frozen roof of the river, bends it up into an icy tunnel of regular form. By degrees parts of the tunnel fall in, and thus the detached arches are left. On the King’s Bay Glacier we afterwards saw more arches of similar origin. It is to the strength of the arctic winter’s frost, rather than to the amount of the annual snowfall, that Spitsbergen glaciers owe their peculiar phenomena, to which the glaciers of high mountain regions in the temperate and tropical parts of the world present no parallels.
Another and still more remarkable outcome of the same forces presently attracted our attention. We were descending the left side of the glacier below the Terrier and approaching the point at the end of the mountain where a great tributary glacier comes in from the east. The two ice-streams, joining, compress one another laterally, and cause a bulging or convexity of their surfaces, which only attain a common uniformity of level at a distance of a mile or so. By this means a triangular hollow is formed between the glaciers, and backed against the foot of the intervening hill. A lake collects in this hollow, and is drained by a stream, which, gradually cutting down its bed as the year advances, lowers the level of the lake. When the winter comes, fresh snow falls into and blocks this stream, damming back the waters so that the level of the lake rises. Its surface, of course, freezes; the ice-covering, with the thawed, refrozen collection of snow upon it, attaining a thickness of four feet and more. On the return of spring, when the snows begin to melt, fresh quantities of water find their way into the lake and raise the heavy ice-sheet. The bed of last year’s streams is of course filled up with hard-frozen snow, so that there is no exit for the waters till the cup is full. The moment it begins to overflow the cutting of the channel takes place. The pent-up waters are let loose and evidently operate with extraordinary force, excavating a deep cañon out of the glacier. The floating ice acquires a momentum, whereby it not merely gets ripped and broken up, but forced forward on to the dry glacier ahead, great tables of it being turned up on end or piled on one another two or three deep. When most of the water is drawn off and the level of the lake is greatly reduced, the convulsion ceases and only the deep cañon and the wild ruin of the ice-blocks, strewn abroad over half a mile square of the glacier, remain to show what mighty forces have been let loose.
During the summer we came upon several such burst lakes at the junctions of glaciers. The most striking of them was this one at the extremity of the Terrier, for, owing to the configuration of the ice, it is unusually large and, besides (like the Märjelen Sea by the Aletsch Glacier), is the receptacle into which many icebergs fall. These icebergs in the winter are frozen in, and tossed out in a wild ruin when the lake bursts. The chaos of strewn ice-blocks is visible from far off, but its origin is not then discernible. Masses of ice were heaped against one another to a height of forty feet or even more. The blue cañon was so deep and undercut that we could not see to the bottom. It was more than sixty feet in depth. There was something inexpressibly weird in the silence and repose of this icy ruin surviving the wild turmoil of its birth. The catastrophe must have been recent, for the icebergs retained the blue colouring and transparency of their submerged parts. We spent a long time clambering about the débris, then hastened forward on our ski and caught up with the sledges.
A lunch halt was made at the top of a steeper slope, just where crevasses began to be numerous. By keeping well round to the left their intricacy was easily avoided. Where the descent was made they were relatively small and for the most part wedged with winter snow, strong enough to bear. Leaving the men to guide the sledges down, we gaily shot the slope, crevasses and all, on our ski. Though the ice was rough and much honeycombed, we covered a mile of descent in a few minutes, “everything safely,” as our dragoman used to say on the Nile in a gale of wind. At the foot, where the glacier became more level, prosaic marching order had to be resumed. Klaas Billen Bay was nearing, a leaden purple, almost black expanse, dotted over with countless icebergs in the gloomy beclouded evening light. The final descent over the steep moraine was even more difficult than the ascent, for the useful snow-strip had melted away and the stones were more unstable than before. The sledges were seriously knocked about in the process of lowering; the metal covering of the runners was stripped off and the runners themselves smashed in two places. They just held together so that we could drag them over the débris fan and the wide bog beyond to where our camp was standing uninjured, with the whaleboat drawn up beside it.
The general result of this inland excursion was highly satisfactory, notwithstanding our misfortune with Svensen. It enabled us to record in outline the general structure of the area included between Wijde Bay, Dickson Bay, Ice Fjord, Wybe Jans Water, and Hinloopen Strait. Before the recently undertaken exploration of the interior, Spitsbergen was supposed to be covered, like Greenland, with a big icesheet. There were known to be some mountains, but they were described as nunataks—islands of rock poked up through the enveloping ice. The nature of the Greenland icesheet is well known; it buries the whole interior beneath its vast thickness, hiding hills and valleys together within its mass, and flowing down over them on all sides to the sea, toward or into which it sends tongues of ice through every gap. All the glaciers in Greenland are but tongues of a single icesheet. Spitsbergen was supposed to resemble Greenland in this respect. In 1896 we proved this view to be erroneous as to the central portion of the island. The belt of land bounded on the south by Bell Sound and on the north by Ice Fjord, and stretching across from sea to sea, is absolutely devoid of any icesheet. It is a complex of mountains and valleys, amongst which are many glaciers indeed, as there are amidst the mountains of Central Europe, but no continuous covering of ice. Each glacier is a separate unit, having its own catchment area and drainage system. The valleys are boggy and relatively fertile, the hillsides bare of snow in summer up to more than 1000 feet above sea-level. There are lines of depression between Ice Fjord and Bell Sound, and between Sassen Bay and the east coast, which are absolutely snow-free throughout the arctic summer.