y through intricate water lanes in
the ice, and sometimes skimming lightly a few yards above the surface of
the solid pack, until they reached the latitude of 82 degrees 30 minutes
North, when the land abruptly trended away to their right and left, and
they found themselves hovering over an immense field of pack-ice which
extended in an unbroken mass as far northward as the eye could reach.

Up to the present, from the time of their passing Disko Island, the
voyagers had seen plenty of seals and walruses, with an occasional white
bear, a few Arctic foxes, a herd or two of reindeer, and even a few
specimens of the elk and musk-ox, to say nothing of birds, such as snow-
geese, eider and long-tailed ducks, sea-eagles, divers, auks, and gulls.
Moreover, they had been favoured with, on the whole, exceptionally fine
weather--due as much as anything, perhaps, to the fact that they had
been fortunate enough to enter the Arctic circle during the prevalence
of a "spell" of fine weather, and that they had accomplished in a very
few days a distance which it would occupy an ordinary craft months of
weary toil to cover. But, on passing the edge of this gigantic ice
barrier, they left all life behind them; even the very gulls--which had
followed them in clouds whenever the speed of the _Flying Fish_ was low
enough to permit of such a proceeding--after wheeling agitatedly about
the ship for a few minutes with discordant screams, as of warning to the
travellers not to venture into so vast and gloomy a solitude, forsook
them and retraced their way to the southward. The weather, too,
changed, the sky becoming overcast with a pall of dull grey snow--laden
cloud accompanied by a dismal murky atmosphere and a temperature of ten
degrees below zero. The wind sighed and moaned over the icy waste; but,
excepting for this dreary and depressing sound, there was absolute
silence, the silence of a dead world.

The ice bore at first the same appearance as all the other ice which
they had hitherto encountered, but by the time that they had advanced a
distance of thirty miles into the frozen desert they became conscious of
a change. The hummocks were not so lofty as heretofore, the hollows
between them having the appearance of being to a considerable extent
filled up with hard frozen snow; the ice itself, too, instead of being a
pure white, was tinged with yellow of the hue of very old ivory; the
sharp angles, also, were all worn away as if by long