Late in the evening, the weather being perfectly re-established, I returned alone to camp. It was an enchanted hour. On one hand, as I sat in the tent-door, facing the sunshine and the view, was the fine peak we named Pretender, rising above the battlement-ridge of the western Queen. On the other hand was a lower hill, shutting off the distance and turning toward me a splendid precipice of rock. Between them was the opening through which the glacier, falling away from my standpoint, joined the apparently boundless expanse of the Crowns Glacier. Beyond were beautiful hills with the silver mist kissing their feet, and, above them in the clear sky, a few wisps of cloud. No breath of air moved, but falling waters sang from near and far, and a fulmar’s whirr occasionally broke the stillness. At such times Nature gathers a man into herself, transforming his self-consciousness into a consciousness of her. All the forms and colours of the landscape sink into his heart like the expression of a great personality, whereof he himself is a portion. Ceasing to think, while Nature addresses him through every sense, he receives direct impressions from her. In this kind of nirvana the passage of time is forgotten, and as near an approach to bliss is experienced as this world is capable of supplying.
The passing hours, whereof some were devoted to sleep, witnessed the establishment of the weather’s perfection. Heights and depths were cloudlessly clear, save low down over the bay, where the bright mist stretched like a carpet far out to sea. Buckling on my snowshoes, I slid forth down the slope, which curved over so steeply at the top that its foot was hidden by the bulge. The exhilaration of that rush through the crisp air is yet quick in remembrance. The cliffs on either hand, glorious battlemented walls of dolomite, seemed to be growing as we descended the side-glacier, whose exit, when we came to it, proved to be closed across by a rampart of moraine. Over this moraine, at a later hour, the sledges had to be carried to the ice of the extreme left margin of the Crowns Glacier, up which we were now to advance. There was no threat of serious impediment for a mile or so, but unexpected obstacles always lie in wait—the seasoning salt of the delight of exploration. A hundred yards on we were brought up sharply by a deep, impassable ice-gully or water-channel, stretching away into the glacier on the left and coming out of the moraine. We turned along its bank and came into the angle where an equally impassable tributary channel branched into it. There was nothing to be done but follow this backward to an overhanging place, cross it there, and then carry the sledges in turn, about a quarter of a mile over moraine, to a point where the other channel fortunately proved traversable. Hummocky ice succeeded for the rest of the march, beneath the grand cliffs of the Pretender (3480 ft.). Two great corries cut into these cliffs, the second of them starting exactly beneath the summit of the peak. We camped at a safe distance below its narrow mouth, beyond the range of frequent volleys of falling stones.
From this point to the base camp would be one long day’s march for men with sledges. We had three and a half days’ provisions left. We could therefore only spare two and a half days for exploration of the neighbourhood. That was not enough, so we sent the two men away with empty sacks to fetch more stores. There was plenty of work to be done in the neighbourhood, for the Pretender’s cliff disclosed all the mysteries of the great fault, which, cutting right across the country, approximately along the line of the King’s Highway, divides the uncontorted, almost horizontally stratified plateau-region of the north from the series of ranges of splintered peaks extending southward to the Dead Man. Accurate observation and careful mapping were, therefore, essential.
After lunch, when the men were gone away, we sat on a sledge in the sunshine, with our coats off, rejoicing in life. The glacier was working and cracking about us unceasingly; stones kept toppling from the moraine close by. High aloft rose the Pretender’s cliff, 2000 feet, almost sheer. It is the most beautifully coloured cliff I ever saw. For foundations it has a contorted mass of ruddy archæan rocks, brilliantly adorned with splashes of golden lichen, picked out with grass-grown ledges. Here, as all along the mountain’s face, are the nesting-places of countless birds. The fulmar petrels choose the lower edges; some, as we found, only just beyond reach of a man’s hand. The wall below them is generally overhanging, for the birds know exactly the limits of a fox’s climbing powers, and they avoid places accessible to him. Higher up are the homes of the little auks, who sit close together in rows, sunning their white bosoms. On the top of every jutting pinnacle of rock a glaucous gull keeps watch, with his own nest near at hand, ready to dive into any unprotected nest, or to pounce on any unfortunate bird that falls a victim to disease. The little auks always fly together in companies, I suppose for mutual protection. There is continual warfare between them and the gulls, but it seems to be carried on in accordance with some accepted law, for though any stray auklet or fallen fledgling is fair game for a gull, he does not seem to attack individual auks sitting near their nests. Indeed, we often saw auks and glaucous gulls sitting close together on the same ledge, when it would have been easy for the gull to have snapped up one of his small neighbours. This, however, must be illegal. We never saw such a crime committed, and the auks evidently felt confident of the gull’s correct behaviour. The nests are not placed in the gullies where stones habitually fall. No matter how big stone-avalanches may come down the usual ruts, the birds watch them unconcerned. But when a stray stone fell down the cliff in an exceptional direction, the birds flew out in their hundreds and thousands, filling the air with protests, the fulmars swooping around, the little auks darting forth horizontally at a higher level straight out and back again, whilst the glaucous gulls more leisurely floated away on confident wing, their white plumage seeming scarcely more solid than the glowing air which sustained their poise.
Above the ancient foundation rocks of the mountain comes a bed of green sandstone, above this a dark red bed, the same which forms the substance of all the Crowns group, except their caps. On the top of the sandstone, whose face has a sloping profile, is planted the summit cap of pink dolomite, cut off on this side in a plumb-vertical cliff horizontally stratified. High aloft in the wonderful air this rose-pink cliff, with its level lines of orange and other tones, like courses of masonry, was an object of rarest beauty, as all who know the Dolomites of Tirol can realise; but the sharp clear atmosphere of the Alps must yield the palm to the soft mellow arctic air, in which Spitsbergen’s mountains almost seem to float. Rose-pink aloft, then purple-red, then green, and finally red again splashed with orange and green: such was the chord of colour presented by this lovely mountain-face between the blue sky and the white glacier foreground.
A funnel-shaped gully, with its upper edge at the foot of the dolomite cliff and the foot of its couloir ending on the glacier, was exactly behind our camp. Snow-slopes at its head were melting fast in the sun, so that a cascade laughed aloud all down the height of it. Stones were continually loosened by the melting; each started others in its fall, so that the rattle of tumbling rocks, now and again swollen by the roar of some big stone avalanche, kept the air in ceaseless vibration.
I made two expeditions out upon the glacier in different directions for the purpose of investigating its character at its most energetic part, just below the summer snowline. It was a maze of crevasses throughout its entire breadth and all the way down from the edge of the névé to the sea. A few traversable lines of route could be found, either parallel to and between the crevasses, or across them, where, owing to a change of slope in the bed, the lips of the crevasses were brought together within striding range. At best the surface was very bumpy, and I foresaw a bad time coming for the sledges. The ice phenomena would have struck any Alpine climber as curious. Every year there are added, even to the central and crevassed portion of an arctic glacier, accumulations of ice formed by the thawing and re-freezing of the winter snow, and these patchwork additions take the most unexpected forms. For instance, a crevasse that happens to be full of water will be roofed over with ice a few feet thick. If the rest of the water is then drained off a tunnel is formed, across which again crevasses may open. We found two or three such tunnels, whose roofs had been squeezed up into barrel-vaults. One of them was still full of water, but the roof had been raised high above it by pressure, and a doorway had been formed by the fall of a portion of the arch. I climbed into this grotto and stood on a ledge. Sunlight glimmered through the crystal roof; the walls were white; for floor there were the indigo-blue depths of the water. This was but one of the strange and beautiful objects that the glacier offered to the wanderer’s admiration. Near the foot of the Pretender a blood-red river, dyed with the dust of the falling sandstones, flowed in a deep white channel cut into the glacier. It soon came to the crevasse that was its fate and plunged down the fatal moulin. That was close to camp. Of course, we called it the Moulin Rouge!
After wandering far I returned home for the night, meeting Garwood on the way. Our backs were to the boundless snowfields; before us the Pretender’s mighty cliff shone warm under the mellow midnight sun, pink high aloft, crimson and green at lower levels, and striped blood-red where the water was pouring down. The white-mounded glacier was mottled over with blue shadows. Perfect weather, perfect scenery, perfect health—what more could we desire?