Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/389

POLAR SCENERY. our way along the ice-foot with much the same fortune as had befallen us since striking the shore above Cape Napoleon. The coast presented the same features—great wall-sided cliffs rising at our left, with a jagged ridge of crushed ice at our right, forming a white fringe, as it were, to the dark rocks. We were, in truth, journeying along a winding gorge or valley, formed by the land on one side and the ice on the other; for this ice-fringe rose about fifty feet above our heads, and, except here and there where a cleft gave us an outlook upon the sea, we were as completely hemmed in as if in a cañon of the Cordilleras. Occasionally, however, a bay broke in upon the continuity of the lofty coast, and as we faced to the westward along its southern margin, a sloping terraced valley opened before us, rising gently from the sea to the base of the mountains, which rose with imposing grandeur. I was never more impressed with the dreariness and desolation of an Arctic landscape. Although my situation on the summit of the Greenland mer de glace, in October of the last year, had apparently left nothing unsupplied to the imagination that was needed to fill the picture of boundless sterility, yet here the variety of forms seemed to magnify the impression on the mind, and to give a wider play to the fancy; and as the eye wandered from peak to peak of the mountains as they rose one above the other, and rested upon the dark and frost-degraded cliffs, and followed along the ice-foot, and overlooked the sea, and saw in every object the silent forces of Nature moving on through the gloom of winter and the sparkle of summer, now, as they had moved for countless ages, unobserved but by the eye of God alone, I felt how puny indeed are all men's works and