Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/14

Rh said to be in part an expression of the real terrors of the arctic regions, and in other part a mere fiction of the imagination. What in Nature could be more terrorizing than those impending bergs, fang-armed like the jaws of some antediluvian monster, and rising hundreds of feet in height, which have been made to do service in the annals of nearly all arctic navigators for a full century or more! Yet how many are there who have in fact seen these fantastic symbols of the north? In our two cruises among thousands of bergs of all conditions and sizes we saw only monuments of quiet and impressive beauty—nothing suggestive of near or immediate catastrophe. A berg would tumble here and there, another would groan under the weight of its own dismemberment, and others would, perhaps, be licking up the parts that the sea had torn from them; but whatever it was, the work was accomplished in a peaceable manner, with a seeming consciousness that it had no regret for the results. Nor, indeed, were the results of any magnitude. Travelers have graphically described the commotion in the waters produced by the fall of one of these vast ice mountains, of the cannon-like detonations which were sent out by the snapping of the ice. I should compare the sound more with that of not very intense or even distant thunder, and the agitation of the waters to the churning of a heavily plowing steamship. There are, however, times when the bergs appear in an angry mood. When the after-storm sends them forth from their havens of rest, shooting billowy foam over and through them it is then that they take on the mane of the lion. The surging waters open out in front of them like the parting in the path of a dolphin, and the bergs swing out triumphantly into the rocking sea. Vain and hopeless would then be the barring of the passage of the moving monster.

The glaciers of Greenland, like their children, have their quiet and angry moods. The flat ice sheets of the north, so firmly consolidated that for miles scarcely a trace of a crevasse is to be found, and whose inclination is such that over almost any part of them railroading could readily be made possible, typify the quiet phase of Nature—wholly different from that which is embodied in the structural form of the majority of the glaciers of the south and of those of Melville Bay, in which the crevasse character is so largely developed. The struggles of Janssen, Nördenskjold, Whymper, Peary, and Nansen would hardly be intelligible to those whose first efforts in glacial climbing were realized among the solid ice sheets of the north, whose only difficult points, as a rule, are to be found not very far from the ocean front of the ice sheet. With seemingly few exceptions all the larger Greenland glaciers are rifted at their terminal falls, but the rifting, as in all other glaciers, depends upon the slope of the bed, the extent of