第66章 LETTER XI(6)

And now,how shall I give you an idea of the wonderful panorama in the midst of which we found ourselves?Ithink,perhaps,its most striking feature was the stillness,and deadness,and impassibility of this new world:ice,and rock,and water surrounded us;not a sound of any kind interrupted the silence;the sea did not break upon the shore;no bird or any living thing was visible;the midnight sun,by this time muffled in a transparent mist,shed an awful,mysterious lustre on glacier and mountain;no atom of vegetation gave token of the earth's vitality:

an universal numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude.I suppose in scarcely any other part of the world is this appearance of deadness so strikingly exhibited.On the stillest summer day in England,there is always perceptible an under-tone of life thrilling through the atmosphere;and though no breeze should stir a single leaf,yet--in default of motion--there is always a sense of growth;but here not so much as a blade of grass was to be seen on the sides of the bald excoriated hills.Primeval rocks and eternal ice constitute the landscape.

The anchorage where we had brought up is the best to be found,with the exception perhaps of Magdalena Bay,along the whole west coast of Spitzbergen;indeed it is almost the only one where you are not liable to have the ice set in upon you at a moment's notice.Ice Sound,Bell Sound,Horn Sound--the other harbours along the west coast--are all liable to be beset by drift-ice during the course of a single night,even though no vestige of it may have been in sight four-and-twenty hours before;and many a good ship has been inextricably imprisoned in the very harbour to which she had fled for refuge.This bay is completely landlocked,being protected on its open side by Prince Charles's Foreland,a long island lying parallel with the mainland.Down towards either horn run two ranges of schistose rocks,about 1,500feet high,their sides almost precipitous,and the topmost ridge as sharp as a knife,and jagged as a saw;the intervening space is entirely filled up by an enormous glacier,which,--descending with one continuous incline from the head of a valley on the right,and sweeping like a torrent round the roots of an isolated clump of hills in the centre--rolls at last into the sea.The length of the glacial river from the spot where it apparently first originated,could not have been less than thirty,or thirty-five miles,or its greatest breadth less than nine or ten;but so completely did it fill up the higher end of the valley,that it was as much as you could do to distinguish the further mountains peeping up above its surface.The height of the precipice where it fell into the sea,I should judge to have been about 120feet.

On the left a still more extraordinary sight presented itself.A kind of baby glacier actually hung suspended half way on the hill side,like a tear in the act of rolling down the furrowed cheek of the mountain.

I have tried to convey to you a notion of the falling impetus impressed on the surface of the Jan Mayen ice rivers;but in this case so unaccountable did it seem that the over-hanging mass of ice should not continue to thunder down upon its course,that one's natural impulse was to shrink from crossing the path along which a breath--a sound--might precipitate the suspended avalanche into the valley.Though,perhaps,pretty exact in outline and general effect,the sketch I have made of this wonderful scene,will never convey to you a correct notion of the enormous scale of the distances,and size of its various features.These glaciers are the principal characteristic of the scenery in Spitzbergen;the bottom of every valley in every part of the island,is occupied and generally completely filled by them,enabling one in some measure to realize the look of England during her glacial period,when Snowdon was still being slowly lifted towards the clouds,and every valley in Wales was brimful of ice.But the glaciers in English Bay are by no means the largest in the island.We ourselves got a view--though a very distant one--of ice rivers which must have been more extensive;and Dr.Scoresby mentions several which actually measured forty or fifty miles in length,and nine or ten in breadth;while the precipice formed by their fall into the sea,was sometimes upwards of 400or 500feet high.Nothing is more dangerous than to approach these cliffs of ice.Every now and then huge masses detach themselves from the face of the crystal steep,and topple over into the water;and woe be to the unfortunate ship which might happen to be passing below.Scoresby himself actually witnessed a mass of ice,the size of a cathedral,thunder down into the sea from a height of 400feet;frequently during our stay at Spitzbergen we ourselves observed specimens of these ice avalanches;and scarcely an hour passed without the solemn silence of the bay being disturbed by the thunderous boom resulting from similar catastrophes occurring in adjacent valleys.