tever else it might be. It
had then gone to the lanes in the ice, and skirted them carefully,
no doubt in the hope of finding a seal or two, and after that it had
gone off between the hummocks and over floes, with a surface of nothing
but slush and water. Had the surface been good I should no doubt have
overtaken Master Bruin, but he had too long a start in the slushy snow.

"A dismal, dispiriting landscape--nothing but white and gray,
No shadows--merely half-obliterated forms melting into the fog and
slush. Everything is in a state of disintegration, and one's foothold
gives way at every step. It is hard work for the poor snow-shoer who
stamps along through the slush and fog after bear-tracks that wind in
and out among the hummocks, or over them. The snow-shoes sink deep in,
and the water often reaches up to the ankles, so that it is hard work
to get them up or to force them forward; but without them one would
be still worse off.

"Every here and there this monotonous grayish whiteness is broken
by the coal-black water, which winds, in narrower or broader lanes,
in between the high hummocks. White, snow-laden floes and lumps of
ice float on the dark surface, looking like white marble on a black
ground. Occasionally there is a larger dark-colored pool, where the
wind gets a hold of the water and forms small waves that ripple and
plash against the edge of the ice, the only signs of life in this
desert tract. It is like an old friend, the sound of these playful
wave-lets. And here, too, they eat away the floes and hollow out
their edges. One could almost imagine one's self in more southern
latitudes. But all around is wreathed with ice, towering aloft in
its ever-varying fantastic forms, in striking contrast to the dark
water on which a moment before the eye had rested. Everlastingly is
this shifting ice modelling, as it were, in pure, gray marble, and,
with nature's lavish prodigality, strewing around the most glorious
statuary, which perishes without any eye having seen it. Wherefore? To
what end all this shifting pageant of loveliness? It is governed by
the mere caprices of nature, following out those everlasting laws
that pay no heed to what we regard as aims and objects.

"In front of me towers one pressure-ridge after another, with lane
after lane between. It was in June the Jeannette was crushed and sank;
what if the Fram were to meet her fate here? No, the ice will not
get the better of her. Yet, if it should,