Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 2.djvu/24

Rh we arrived at the base of Jones's Tower, the mountain just alluded to. A short time after this I began to ascend Jones's Tower, the mountain which I especially observed for the first time some months before, when entering Field Bay. When near the summit I made the following entry in my note-book:— "4.47 With my glass I see that Ebierbing has just killed a seal. Thank God for our daily bread (seal), while we study His glorious works. Thirty seals around the little bay on the ice by their holes, sunning." At, the top of the tower I took several observations, and then attempted to descend on the opposite side to that by which I had climbed up. But I found here, as I had before, that going down a precipitous mountain is much worse than going up it. I could not manage it by the new route, and therefore had to reascend in order to take the other.

From the summit of this mountain the view was extensive, yet I could not thence discern Frobisher Bay, although, as I then thought, it was not more than from five to seven miles off. I here found a butterfly just bursting its prison walls. The wind at the time was so strong as almost to defy my power of holding on. The place looked like a huge tower rather than a mountain; and on one side of it there was, as it were, a broad highway, leading spirally to within fifty feet of the apex. From this elevation a hundred icebergs were in view. On the way down I found some skeleton bones of a whale, about 300 feet above the sea-ice; and also tufts of grass and some reindeer moss. At the base I found Koodloo and Ebierbing with more seals which they had killed, and a fire made of the small shrub before mentioned. In the evening we encamped here, close to Robinson's Bay, a beautiful sheet of water on the east side of the tower. Here