CHAPTER VI
OSBORNE GLACIER AND PRETENDER PASS
Explorers in most parts of the world are able to sketch general maps of large areas, which they may have traversed only along a single line of route. Undulating country intersected by prominent waterways and rising at considerable intervals to prominent altitudes can be mapped in a sketchy fashion by the rapidest traveller, if skilled. A few compass bearings fix the position of prominent points; positions, astronomically determined from time to time as opportunity arises, clamp the whole together and enable it to be adjusted on the proper part of the globe; whilst, as for details, who cares about them in a new country? The mountain explorer, however, that person most unpopular with geographers, is faced by topographical problems of a far more complicated character. His routes always lie along valleys, whose sides cut off the distant view and whose bends often prevent him from looking either ahead or back. When he climbs a peak, assuming him to have a clear view, which is rare, he beholds a wide panorama, it is true, but, save in the foreground, it consists of a throng of peaks, whose summits alone are visible over intervening ridges. If, following tradition, he laboriously fixes the position of some of them, it is lost labour, for the mere dotting upon a map of the points of a lot of peaks tells a geographer nothing. What he wants to know is the number and direction of ranges, the position of watersheds, the relation of rivers to the original earth-crinkles which determined their direction and in turn are so remarkably modified by them. To make merely a sketch-map of a considerable mountain area thus involves an amount of travel within it beyond all comparison greater than that entailed by the exploration of open country. The smaller the scale of the mountains, and the closer they are packed together, the more frequently must the area be traversed in different directions before a sketch-map of it can be made.
King James Land is an example of a region excessively difficult to map. It is covered by a wonderful multitude of mountains, which may be described in a general way as planted in ranges running from north-west to south-east. Of these there are about six principal ones between the King’s Highway and the Dead Man, and quantities more to the north. The old-fashioned geographer would have been content to draw parallel caterpillars on his map and so fill it up. But, as a matter of fact, there are throngs of subsidiary ranges and crossing hollows, so that the glacier, flowing down one valley, robs from its neighbour the snow accumulated in its upper reservoir; and it is exactly in these phenomena that the geographical interest of the region consists, for they show how ice-denudation works, and the kind of modelling effect which ice can produce on a land surface, an effect totally different in kind from that fabled by home-staying geologists, with their imagined excavating ice-streams.
Thus far we had only made acquaintance with one glacier-valley cutting across the island from Kings Bay to Ice Fjord. We determined to look into another, to the south, before turning northward to the Crowns group. On July 31 we accordingly broke up camp, loaded the sledges, and bade the men set off, down the way we had come, as far as Junction Point, where they were to await our arrival. Garwood and I, in the meantime, were to cross the range of hills at the south of our camp, descend into the next valley, and return over the pass at its head, which must of course give access to the snowfield of the southern branch of Highway Glacier. Descending that we should come to Junction Point.
It was another brilliant day, and so warm that the snow was softened to an unusual depth. During or immediately after frost the surface of névé sparkles in sunlight as though sprinkled with countless diamonds; but on warm days there are no diamonds, but only drops of water, the surface crystals being melted. The forms and surfaces of snow are thereby softened, and this softening effect is recognisable even from great distances. At starting, the view over Ice Fjord was clearer than ever, and we could distinguish Bunting Bluff, Fox Peak, and other scenes of last year’s toils and delights. The work immediately in hand was to ascend a long snow-slope, rising from Highway Pass to a col about 200 feet higher in the range to the south—a broad snow-saddle at the foot of a very fine peak, the ascent of which from this side would be dangerous, for its whole face is swept by ice-avalanches. Somewhere in the rocks of this peak are the nesting-places of many birds, the chorus of whose voices was heard as a faint hum. The new pass looked down upon the head of a large glacier, and across it to an innumerable multitude of peaks, all shining in the blaze of midday. At our feet was a secluded bay of this glacier. A splendid ski-glissade landed us on its snowy floor, and we were soon out on the main glacier, which swept down from the pass we were to cross next. Halting at a convenient spot, we took stock of the view. It was beautiful, of course—every view is beautiful in King James Land; but its interest made me forget its beauty for a time. We expected to find in this trough a glacier parallel to the Highway, and we did find one, and a large one too, larger than the Highway, because fed by several tributaries from the south; but to our surprise this glacier did not flow in the expected direction, but due south for many miles, and instead of ending in Ice Fjord, or on its shore, ran up against a big mass of mountains and, bending round to the right or south-west, disappeared from view. At the angle it received a wide tributary from the north-east. This great glacier, in fact, empties itself into the head of St. John’s Bay. As that bay was originally named Osborne’s Inlet, after an early whaling skipper, we gave his name to this glacier. Garwood, I believe, explains the twist of the mountains which cause this deflection of the glacier as the result of a fault dying out; but, lest I should unwillingly misrepresent his conclusions, I leave him to describe them himself. The mountains near at hand to the south were of beautiful forms, reminding us of well-known Swiss peaks, Weisshorns, Gabelhorns, and so forth. There was much aqueous vapour in the air, reducing its transparency and adding to the effects of distance. The mottled sky cast a decorative patchwork of shadows on the snow. Skeins of cloud were forming, and in the north the weather was again threatening dark and evil things.
On us, however, toiling up the long, long slopes to the pass, coy as are all the wide white passes in this land, the sun shone with painful fierceness. It burned as it sometimes does on the high Alps, so that we soon began to suffer from sun-headaches and parching thirst. Nowhere was there a drop of water to be squeezed from the apparently sodden snow. Having survey instruments and cameras to carry, we were sparely provided with food. Hunger came to weaken us and double the apparent length of the way. At last we were on the col, but the downward slope was very gentle and the snow now became sticky, so that the ski would not slide. We bore away to the right in search of a steeper incline and struck blue ice covered with mere slush that even the ski sank into. There were dry patches of it, too slippery to stand on; it was a mere alternation of evils. Sometimes we stuck fast and sometimes fell heavily. What was looked forward to as an easy and delightful excursion became a most laborious day’s work. “This is your picnic,” cried Garwood to me as he fell more than usually hard, “I hope you like it.” But all things come to an end, and so did this march. Junction Point appeared in sight, with a lake-basin between the branch glaciers where they join, a basin similar to that at the foot of the Terrier, and, like it, recently drained. The heavy ice, formed on its surface in the winter, had been carried all over the neighbourhood by the momentum of the escaping water, and now lay spread about, high and dry. With a struggle and a scramble we passed round the head of the lake and came in view of the men resting on the sledges. The unbelieving Svensen had climbed a neighbouring eminence to look out. Nielsen informed us that Svensen had been full of forebodings all day. They would never see us again, he said. We were gone into the wilderness and would be engulfed; as for them, when the provisions were finished they in their turn would die of starvation. Fool that he was not to take his old woman’s advice and stay at home where he was well off, instead of coming to this snow-buried circle of the infernal regions! Camp was pitched on the very tracks of our upward journey. Then the sky clouded over and the wind rose. After one last look towards Kings Bay, reflecting the golden west and framed by purple hills, we closed the tent-doors and rejoiced to be “at home.”
The lovely weather re-established itself in the daylit night, so that, when we awoke, sunshine lay abroad upon the glacier. Looking downward we had on our right hand the dull slope of the Queens group, where a smooth side glacier comes slanting down the midst of it from a col whose existence had not been revealed till now. It was decided to climb to this col for the purpose of making a closer investigation of the structure of the group. The march accordingly began with a long traversing descent of the main glacier to a point on its right bank at the foot of the side glacier. It mischanced that the area to be traversed was exactly the wettest belt of the whole basin. We skirted it on the ascent; now we had to go right across it, and that too after a series of fine melting days. The watery surface shone like a lake, and did in fact consist of a succession of pools, communicating with one another by slushy belts through which streams sluggishly meandered. The reader must not conceive of the pools, streams, and snow as corresponding to water and land, for the snow, even where it emerged, was permeated with water like a saturated sponge. When the autumnal frost masters a snow-bog and binds its errant molecules into a mass, there is formed a solid, built up of ice-prisms, each about one inch in diameter and as long as the bog was deep. Prismatic ice of this kind, the product of the preceding winter, is frequently met with on Spitsbergen glaciers. Its cause puzzled us greatly when first we came upon it. With the motion of the glacier, the formation of crevasses, and so forth, it often happens that the side pressure which held the prisms together is removed. Their tendency is to thaw and separate along their planes of junction. By this means are produced opening sheaves of long ice-crystals, most beautiful to look upon. I have found them in quantities a foot or more long, opening out “like quills upon a fretful porcupine.” Where there is no relaxation of lateral pressure, the crystals are held together; but they form a fabric of weak cohesion, and when you tread upon it your foot crunches in, almost as far as into snow.
Across this uncomfortable region we travelled for hours. Sometimes there were deep channels to cross; rarely a dry, hard patch intervened; most of the time there was slush of different consistencies which we had to push through. The sledges seemed to grow heavier and more resistant every hour. One of them, of which the runners were not shod with metal, came to grief at a stream-gully, where it pitched on its nose and smashed a runner. At last the water was left behind and dry ice gained. At the foot of a long, downward slope we found a big, frozen lake that had not yet burst the bonds imposed on it by the previous winter; crossing its rough surface, we climbed on to the moraine beyond, at the foot of the side glacier now to be ascended. The stone débris of dolomite rock, covering the lower part of the slope, were dotted about with various common plants, Dryas octapetala, Saxifraga oppositifolia, arctic poppy, and so forth, the same that grow in the interior wherever there is any soil to accommodate them. Of the ascent little need be said. We shall not soon forget it. The slope was the steepest encountered by the sledges. Our forces just sufficed to raise them, but there was nothing to spare. We arrived at the level top exhausted. Camp was pitched on the col, a wide snow-saddle between the Queen (4060 ft.) and an unimportant but commanding buttress peak. To the latter I hurried, desirous of making observations while the view was clear, for sea-mists had been observed crawling up both from Kings and English bays, and uniting on the pass near Mount Nielsen. There is nothing more beautiful than a sea-fog beheld from above when the sun shines upon it. By contrast its brilliant metallic whiteness makes purest snow grey. Then it moves so beautifully, gliding inland and putting out arms before it or casting off islands that wander away at their own sweet will. Enchanting to look upon are these sea-fairies, save to the victim to their embraces. Once inveigled, all their beauty vanishes, for within they are cold, cheerless, and grey, like the depths whence they spring. But to-day they were not destined to advance far. They came up boldly a while, then faltered and turned back, remaining thenceforward among the seracs and crevasses, except a few rambling outliers that floated away over the glacier or hovered as bright islands in hollows of the surface. Faint beds of variously transparent vapour, horizontally stratified, barred across the fine range of craggy mountains and their glacier cascades that filled the space between Cross Bay and the Crowns Glacier, a mountain group with an exceptionally fine skyline. We were encamped at that level of the glacier which may be described as the singing level, where water trickles all about, tinkling in tiny ice-cracks, rippling in rivulets, roaring in moulins, and humming in the faint base of the remoter torrents. It is only on slopes of a reasonable inclination that these sounds arise. The flat snowbogs of our morning traverse were soundless.