Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/18

8 was missing. Mr. Verhoeff, mineralogist of the North Greenland party, had made a final excursion after new rock specimens, and from this search he never returned to meet his associates. It was to ascertain his fate that we were again summoned to those icy fields and domes whose first acquaintance we had but



recently made. We suspected that our poor friend had attempted a traverse of one of the many glacial sheets which tumbled out into the sea and that disaster had overtaken him in his lonely tour. Accordingly, we instituted a close search over mountain top and valley, and day and night peered among the ice pinnacles for possible traces of the missing man. Our first search was made on the great glacier, since named the Sun Glacier, which cuts the eastern extremity of McCormick Bay, and parts the dry land which in the summer season bounds both the northern and southern shores. It was early in the evening of the 19th of August, when the elevation of the sun still marked about twenty degrees above the horizon, that we again entered the shadows of the same granite cliffs over which, only a few days before, we had so joyfully passed after our meeting with Mr. Peary on his return from his memorable journey. The scene had changed. The deep cañon, along which the eye could follow the long, lazy line of glacier for a distance of twelve to fifteen miles to its mother ice cap, looked bleak and forbidding; there was no longer that charm of the unknown about it which attracts when all Nature smiles with success. A dark cloud had settled over the landscape and for a time closed out its joys.