Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/21

Rh fort. Fortunately, the storm was of only short duration, and in its wake the landscape rose resplendent in its new garb.

We had now penetrated up stream about five or six miles, and had ascended probably six hundred or seven hundred feet in that distance. At three o'clock in the morning we started upon our return. We had seen nothing, and no sound, save the echoes from the beetling cliff's of granite and trap, which here rose in impending masses two thousand five hundred or three thousand feet above us, responded to the oft-repeated shouts to which we gave utterance.

The general aspect and features of the Sun Glacier we found repeated in a still more gigantic ice sheet, the Verhoeff Glacier, which bore the final traces of our unfortunate associate and buried in its bosom the forlorn hope which carried our search for upward of seven days and nights over mountain, snow, and ice. This glacier measures two miles across its terminal wall, but in its middle course, where it is split by a giant nunatak rising hundreds of feet above the glistening sheet of ice, it expands to fully twice this width, and then recalls the broad mers de glace with which, as miniatures, we had become acquainted in the ice fields of Switzerland and Scandinavia. But here we have the flat united ice mass, with only a suggestion of crevasse to remind one that the ice is a moving body, tearing itself apart and then uniting; all appears firm and stationary, except small rills, which in serpentine courses cut shallow troughs into the surface and musically wend their way to lower levels, ultimately to join the sea. To the eye the main part of the glacier appeared almost absolutely horizontal, and probably it was the flattest of all the sheets that we examined. We were unable to determine the rate of motion, but doubtless it was exceedingly slow, perhaps averaging not more than twelve to fifteen inches in twenty-four hours. In the Sun Glacier we had determined a movement of some seven or eight inches in as many hours, but this was in a part of the glacier where the ice was badly cut by crevasses and in its more rapidly moving lower section. In some of the minor glaciers of the same region we could determine no motion at all, and possibly at that time they had come to an almost absolute standstill. While no detailed observations on the motion of the glaciers of northern Greenland have as yet been made, and therefore no safe deductions can be drawn from the fragmentary records that are now before us, it would appear, nevertheless, almost certain that the majority of the northern ice sheets are much slower in their motion than those of South and Central Greenland—a condition, indeed, that might have been inferred from the conditions of climate which govern the several regions.

The Verhoeff Glacier presented one aspect in its existence