Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/924

 self. It is on these islands, or outskirting land, that the population of Greenland lives, and the Danish trading-posts are built — all the rest of the country, with the exception of this island circlet, being an icy, landless, sea-like waste of glacier, which can be seen here and there peeping out in the distance. On some of the large and more mountainous islands, as might be expected in such a climate, there are small independent glaciers, in many cases coming down to the sea, and there discharging icebergs ; but these glaciers are of little importance and have no connexion with the great internal ice-covering of the country. I have called the land circling this interior ice-desert " a collection of islands," because, though many of them are joined together by glaciers, and only a few are wholly insulated by water, many of them (indeed, the majority) are bounded on their eastern side by this internal inland ice ; yet, whether bounded by water or by ice, the boundary is perpetual, and whatever be the insulating medium, they are to all intents and purposes islands.

1 . The interior Ice-field. — -This is well known to the Danes in Green- land by the name of the " inlands iis; " and though a familiar subject of talk amongst them from the earliest times 1, it is only a very few of the " colonists " who have ever reached it. The natives everywhere have a great horror of penetrating into the interior, not only on account of the dangers of ice-travel, but from a superstitious notion that the interior is inhabited by evil spirits in the shape of all sorts of monsters.

Crossing over the comparatively narrow strip of land, the traveller comes to this great inland ice (fig. 1, a). If the termination of it is at the sea, its face looks like a great ice wall : indeed the Eskimo call it the Sermik soak, which means this exactly. The height of this icy face varies according to the depth of the valley or fjord which it fills. If the valley is shallow the height is low, if, on the contrary, it is a deep glen, then the sea-face of the glacier in the fjord is lofty. Prom one thousand to three thousand feet is not uncommon. In such situations the face is always steep, because bergs are continually breaking off from it ; and in such situations it is not only dangerous to approach it, on account of the ice falling, or the wave caused by the displacement of the water, but from the great steepness of the face it is rarely possible to get on to it in such situations 2. In such places Dr. Rink has generally found that it rises by successive terraces to the general level plateau beyond 3. However, where it does not reach the sea, it is often possible to climb on it from the land by a gentle slope, or even in some cases to step up on it as it shelves up. Once fairly on the inland ice, a dreary scene meets the view. Par as the eye can reach, to the north and to the south is this same great ice-field, the only thing to relieve the eye being the wind-

1 " Interioribus ob plagam glacialem continuam inhabitabilibus." Fabricius, Fauna Greenlandica, 1780.

2 The " great glacier " of Humboldt is merely such an exposed glacier-face, though of great extent.

3 Kane calls this the " escaladed structure" of the Greenland glacier. ' Arctic Explorations' (American ed.), vol. ii. p. 284.