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 ACROSS THE ICE-FIELD, 263 fronuVictoria Island, the party found themselves on a mucli less undulating ice-field, the different portions of which had evidently not been subjected to any great pressure. It was clear that in con- sequence of the direction of the currents the influence of the masses of permanent ice in the north had not here been felt, and Hobson and his comrades soon found that this ice-field was intersected with wide and deep crevasses not yet frozen over. The temperature here was comparatively warm, and the thermometer maintained a mean height of more than 34° Fahrenheit. Salt water, as is well known, does not freeze so readily as fresh, but requires several degrees of cold below freezing point before it becomes solidified, and the sea was therefore still liquid. All the icebergs and floes here had come from latitudes farther north, and, if we may so express it, lived upon the cold they had brought with them. The whole of the southern portion of the Arctic Ocean was most imperfectly frozen, and a warm rain was falling, which hastened the dissolution of what ice there was. On the 24th November the advance of the travellers was abso- lutely arrested by a crevasse full of rough water strewn with small icicles — a crevasse not more than a hundred feet wide, it is true, but probably many miles long. For two whole hours the party skirted along the western edge of this gap, in the hope of coming to the end of it and getting to the other side, so as to resume their march to the east, but it was all in vain, they were obliged to give it up and encamp on the wrong side. Hobson and Long, however, proceeded for another quarter of a mile along the interminable crevasse, mentally cursing the mildness of the winter which had brought them into such a strait. " Yes, yes," replied the Lieutenant, " and we shall pass it, either by going up to the north, or down to the south, it must end somewhere. But after we have got round this we shall come to others, and so it will go on perhaps for hundred of miles, as long as this uncertain and most unfortunate weather continues ! " " Well, Lieutenant, we must ascertain the truth once for all before we resume our journey," said the Sergeant. " We must indeed. Sergeant," replied Hobson firmly, " or w shall run a risk of not having crossed half the distance b tween u
 * We must pass somehow," said Long, *' for we can't stay where
 * we are."