of true day. A few foxes ventured near our tracks, and some crows winged their way landward, but these were all the signs of animal life that gave movement to the landscape. About two miles from the ice front a great pyramidal rock mountain or nunatak split the glacial stream, causing it to swell into gently rising waves and crests, which mounted terracelike one above the other, without, however, materially breaking the continuity of the surface. We found progression over this billowy surface slow and fatiguing; it was difficult to hold the toboggan in position, as the steel runners gained no purchase upon the adamant polish of the ice. It swayed from side to side, undulating like the fins of a fish, and keeping us in a constant state of adjustment. As the slope increased at an elevation of about fourteen hundred feet, crevasses gradually took the place of the fissure splits, and it was found advisable to make use of the rope. We tied ourselves together in single line, keeping about twelve feet apart. There were few crevasses of greater width than the length of our toboggan, and most of these were of insignificant depth, yet there was enough danger in them to warrant a sharp lookout. The snow bridges were particularly treacherous, and their presence was sometimes only made known through an unexpected plunge. Cautiously avoiding these so far as it was possible, and the numerous ugly holes which only too frequently interrupted our course, we finally reached the basin, eighteen hundred feet above the sea, out of which the glacier emerges. We had accomplished our mission; the great glacier lay all below us, and above were only the sky and the upper snow fields which tirelessly fade off to unite with the sky.

A pleasanter ice party than this one can hardly be conceived. With a temperature that was neither warm nor cold, and with just sufficient point in it to give to it that exhilarating quality which impels to work; with a lingering midnight sun sending its warm illumination through a seemingly endless rift of clouds and bergs; a mountain and ocean panorama of almost matchless grandeur around you; a solitude immeasurable and undefinablethese are the elements which united in an exercise to make it forever memorable.

A few days after this first experience we were called upon to do a piece of glacial work the memory of which, unfortunately, associates itself with one of those sad incidents of travel which are seemingly destined, from time to time, to break upon the rugged path of exploration. When all but ready to leave the icebound northern shores for the more hospitable havens of the south, whither we had hoped to convey, unbroken by disaster, the untarnished record of a most successful exploration, intelligence was brought to our quarters that a member of our party

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 doop 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.

We approached the front wall of the glacier with caution and almost in silence, fearing lest any percussion might too hastily precipitate some of the tottering masses which were "calving" their way to sea as bergs. Like the snowy avalanches of the Alps, which are at times called to life by the clapping of the hands, so must these ice masses of the north be left to their own peaceful slumbers. Once overturned, there can be no forecasting of the commotion that might follow. A turn or two may end the scene, or it can be that it has hardly begun before the water is churned into foam.

Cutting our steps into the dome-shaped lateral margin of the glacier, we soon gained the surface, upon which walking was fairly easy and comfortable. An effort to reach the opposite side was frustrated by the numerous crevasses which cut into the median portion of the ice, and about which we were obliged to wander in a tortuous, zigzag line. Generally, however, we managed to keep on a united body, or where the fissures were of but insignificant width. For some distance the surface of the ice kept disagreeably hummocky, but after passing a feeding glacier it

spread out in an almost horizontal glistening sheet, admirably adapted for sledging purposes and of necessity for pedestrianism. The crevasses became less and less numerous, and ultimately ceased altogether, so that a traverse could be made in any direction. A narrow, remarkably straight, and evenly defined medial moraine, more in the nature of a dirt band, with angular blocks scattered over it-so like the "archaic" illustrations which figure in the works of Forbes and Agassiz and in other old-fashioned books of geology-occupied the central axis, stretching off upward to the limit of vision. As in all the other Greenland glaciers which it was our pleasure to explore, there were no really

large blocks in the moraines, and there was a complete or nearly complete absence of glacial tables and pyramids. Here and there low mounds of gravel and stones heaped themselves up in beehivelike masses, such as have also been found on the surfaces of the glaciers of Alaska and Spitzbergen, and occasional impacts had also thrown the ice into deformed caps and rafts. There were no ice rivers worthy of the name, and such channels as still marked the courses of surface waters were of but insignificant extent.

Had our mission been different from what it really was we might have said that this glacial traveling was truly delightful. With all the beauty of the ice fields of Switzerland, and that charm of pedestrianism which an unexpected and varying change of scene carries with it, we had here the advantage of the

many hours, the consciousness that a journey was not limited to any arbitrary separation of day from night. It was all day, albeit the sun shone for only a paltry few hours. For some time angry-looking clouds had been gathering about the blackened granite crests; the side cañons poured out their fleecy hosts, and before long the wild spirits of the mountains swept demonlike across the valley of the glaciers. The few lazily falling flakes which for a half hour or so had portended evil were before long replaced by blinding sheets of snow, and for a long time, save in its elements, Nature ceased to exist. The landscape was completely blotted out from view. We were not prepared for this change, and the cold wind stung mercilessly wherever it caught an exposed surface. We muffled ourselves as best we could in our not over-generous garments, but yet it was not all solid com

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 cliffs 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