CHAPTER VIII
RETURN TO KINGS BAY
All appearances were convincing that the weather had finally broken up, but a charm seemed to lie upon King James Land this year, for next morning (August 7) was fine as ever, with skies brilliantly clear. The white fog still covered the bay and the glacier’s foot, but retreated before us as we advanced on the downward journey, for which the time had now come. Instead of going far out on to the glacier, as in our ascent, we kept a more direct course, for crevasses that are too wide to drag sledges over when going uphill are passable on the way down. The sledges had to make many a downward jump, and were greatly strained, but we reckoned they would hold out to the coast, and so let them take their luck. It was none of the best. A certain broad crevasse opposed to our advance its yawning chasm, whose higher side was much above the lower. The first sledge took the jump safely, but the second landed heavily on its nose, and one runner snapped in half. We tied it up with string, but the jagged edge greatly increased the friction during the remainder of the journey. Near the Pretender we re-entered the circuit of the nesting birds, and found their feathers at every step of the way. A solitary fulmar sitting on the ice only stirred when we approached him within two yards. Then he flapped his wings and ran, gradually rising into the air and helping himself up by beating the ground with his feet, the action used by fulmars when they rise from water. He did not fly far, for he was obviously ill. Doubtless a glaucous gull presently put an end to his existence.
Having kept along the left side of the glacier, we came, at the foot of the Pretender, as we knew we must, to a steep ice staircase, a slope of about 200 feet, broken by a series of large crevasses. A longitudinal fold in the ice, caused by the narrowing of the glacier at this point, added a more complex irregularity to the step-like descent. This was the worst place we had to convey sledges over on the glaciers of Spitsbergen; nor shall I attempt to describe our labours. The sledges were slung across some crevasses, let down over others, gingerly conducted along ridges of ice narrower than themselves, with profound chasms on each side, hauled round the flanks of seracs, and otherwise forced forward as circumstances decreed. Once only did a misfortune occur, and then the fault was mine. The slope was very steep, and there was a crevasse in the way. Nielsen got on to its lower lip and began lifting the bow of the sledge forward by means of the drag-rope. I was hanging on behind with the pick-end of the ice-axe hitched into the stern. Just at the critical moment something gave way. The ice-axe slipped out; I fell backwards; the sledge lumbered down. That it would go right into the crevasse and be utterly lost seemed certain. But no! it merely turned a somersault and wedged itself in between two projecting noses of ice, which held it firmly, till, with the assistance of the others, we brought it safe to land. Shortly afterward the site of Pretender Camp was reached, and our little heap of stores found undisturbed by foxes or birds.
We knew that the most tiresome part of the day’s journey was yet to come; the lunch-halt was consequently prolonged. To the foot of Pretender Pass the way was easy enough, but beyond that point difficulties were bound to accumulate, for the glacier became so crevassed as to be impassable even for men without sledges, whilst, instead of snow-slopes along the left bank, there was a widening lateral moraine. Fortunately we found an irregular belt of snow between the ridge of this moraine and the débris-slope behind it; along that belt we were able to make intermittent advance, though the snow was freely strewn with blocks of stone, over and around which, up and down and in and out, the sledges had to be lifted and dragged. We were thankful even for this small mercy, seeing that, if the snow had not been there, we must have raised the sledges bodily and carried them more than a mile over the nastiest kind of moraine. As it was, we had to carry them for several short spells. How easy it looks on paper! Four men, one at each corner of the sledge; they lift her, and along she goes. But in practice, when the ground to be traversed consists of loose rocks, each about the size of a man’s head, with ice below them, sloping this way and that, uphill two yards, downhill three yards, now tilted to the right, now to the left, some one is always stumbling. They jog one another from side to side. The weight gets bandied about and heaved in all directions, so that each wastes most of his work in counter-balancing the unintentional irregularities of his fellows’ efforts. A halt had to be made halfway along, but we vowed to finish this horrible part of the route before camping. The stove was lit and cocoa brewed to put heart into the men; then on again, plunging, tripping, twisting ankles, barking shins, till at last there came a practicable though lumpy stretch of ice alongside the moraine, and we could launch the sledges on it and haul them forward with less toil. We were close to the angle where Kings and Highway glaciers join, and the lateral moraines of both, uniting at the promontory of the dividing mountain, flow out as a medial moraine, and are carried on by the glacier and ultimately dumped over the ice-cliff into Kings Bay. We crossed this medial moraine at the earliest convenient place, then followed along beside it till near midnight, when somebody, turning round to survey the view, found it beautiful, and proposed that camp should be pitched straightway.
The air was crisp and cold. The sun shone golden in the north, just tinged with the first promise of its winter setting. The mellow light flooded with unusual glory of colour the many-tinted rocks of the Crowns and Pretender, grouped together in fine assemblage between the two great glaciers, now both at once beheld back to their highest snowfields. Such purples as the autumnal midnight sun pours out on the so-called Liefde-Bay sandstones of Spitzbergen had no rival even in the richest product of Tyrian skill. All night long the glacier worked and cracked beneath us in its onward flow, squeezing its slow way down through the narrowing channel. Loud reports disturbed our slumbers, and at an early hour brought us back to consciousness of the beauty of the world and the continuing loveliness of the weather.
The sky remained clear, and the white fog brooded over the waters of the bay, when the men started down with the sledges, leaving us to sit awhile on convenient rocks, smoking and enjoying the splendid scenery. Presently we also set forth, not down, but across Highway Glacier to examine the rocks of its left bank. A very large lake-basin had to be crossed at the margin of the ice. It proved to have been drained by the biggest ice-tunnel I ever saw, a cavern at least fifty feet in diameter and more than a hundred yards long. I bolted into it, under the stones perched loosely on its brow, and took some photographs of the weird grotto, whilst Garwood climbed the riskily loose cliff behind and hunted for fossils. Keeping across the mouth of a minor side glacier, we came to the moraine crossed by us with so much trouble on the upward way. The great hollow beyond it was now perceived to be another and yet larger lake-basin, drained in its turn by the ice-cañon which had formed one of our first considerable impediments. This lake-basin is more than half a mile in length, and some hundreds of yards wide. It lies at the foot of Mount Nielsen. Here, losing sight of Garwood, I turned to seek the sledges. Not finding them, and being too cold to loiter about, I walked briskly on down the foot of the glacier, and did not halt till the base camp was reached. It remained just as we left it, thank goodness! But it must have had a narrow escape, for, at some time during our absence, a flood of water came down the fan on which it stood, cutting a new channel, whose still wet margin ran less than a hand’s breadth from the angle of the tent. Had the channel been deflected a couple of yards, all our goods would have gone to sea!
The roof of fog was overhead, yet the view was most beautiful, for the sun shone through holes in it upon the glacier’s terminal cliff, barring it with vertical bands of light and colour. There were stripes of purple, violet, green, blue, and white, made by the staining of the ice with stone débris, or by new fractures manifesting the varying transparency of the mass, or by the play of light and shadow upon it. The jagged hills looked down through holes or behind veils of mist. The water was absolutely calm, but more thickly covered with broken ice than when we last beheld it; in fact, over great areas, the floating blocks seemed to form a continuous ice-covering. In calm weather this mattered little, but if a northerly wind set in, all the ice would be driven and packed down upon us, and we should be imprisoned, who could say for how long? Obviously, therefore, it would be our business to shift camp as soon as possible to some more favourable situation.
Long I sat in the tent-door gazing at the view and dreaming. What changes had taken place here since Professor Sven Lovén’s visit in 1837, the first visit of any man of science to this part of Spitsbergen! The island of which he wrote so fully, with its “diminutive Alps” and moraines, was separated from the glacier at that time by a channel of open water 1000 feet wide; now the glacier almost surrounds it and has buried out of sight the ground on which he stood. It had already done so before Nordenskiöld’s visit in 1861, since when no considerable changes have taken place. This is only one of many instances of glacial advance during the present century. A comparison between the seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch charts and the maps of the present day proves the general truth of this observation. The development seems to be still in progress. Witness the great glacier-front which has descended into Agardh Bay since 1871, and over which we went in crossing the Ivory Gate last year. Glaciers which end in shallow waters must, indeed, be advancing slowly as they fill up the bay heads, but this does not suffice to explain so great an advance as that of the Kings Glacier between 1837 and 1861.