Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/470

 in the cold air. Its surface is barren to the last degree; immense chasms or cañons cross it in all directions, in which there was not the remotest trace of vegetation,—great yawning depths with jagged beds and crumbling sides,—sunless as the Cimerian caverns of Avernus.

As I clambered over crag after crag, I thought that I had not in the summer-time anywhere lit upon a place so devoid of life; but, as if to compensate for this barrenness, or through some freak of Nature, a charming cup-like valley nestled among the forbidding hills, and upon it I stumbled suddenly. Balboa could hardly have been more surprised when he climbed the hills of Darien and first saw the Pacific Ocean. It was truly a "Diamond of the Desert," and the little hermitage in the wilderness of Engadi was not a more pleasing sight to the Knight of the Couchant Leopard than was this to me.

The few hardy plants which I had found in all other localities had failed to find a lodgment upon the craggy slopes of this rough cape, and the rocks stood up in naked barrenness, without the little fringe of vegetation which usually girdles them elsewhere; but down into this valley the seeds of life had been wafted; the grass and moss clothed it with green; and the poppies and buttercups sprinkled it over with leaves of gold. In its centre reposed a little sparkling lake, like a diamond in an emerald setting—a little "charmed sea," truly,

"Girt by mountains wild and hoary;"

and weird and wonderful as any that ever furnished theme for Norland legend.

From the lower margin of this lake a stream