y
into fits of laughter.

"What d'ye think o' that, father?"

"I think it's somewhat dangerous," answered the Captain, recovering his
gravity and re-shouldering his axe. "However, as long as you enjoy the
work, it can't hurt you, so go ahead, my boy; it'll be a long time
before you cut away too much o' the Polar ice!"

Reaching a slightly open space beyond this point, the dogs were
harnessed, and the party advanced for a mile or so, when they came to
another obstruction worse than that which they had previously passed.

"There's a deal of ice-rubbish in these regions," remarked Benjy, eyeing
the wildly heaped masses with a grave face, and heaving a deep sigh.

"Yes, Massa Benjy, bery too much altogidder," said Butterface, echoing
the sigh.

"Come, we won't cut through this," cried Captain Vane in a cheery voice;
"we'll try to go over it. There is a considerable drift of old snow
that seems to offer a sort of track. What says Chingatok?"

The easy-going Eskimo said that it would be as well to go over it as
through it, perhaps better!

So, over it they went, but they soon began to wish they had tried any
other plan, for the snow-track quickly came to an end, and then the
difficulty of passing even the empty sledges from one ice mass to
another was very great, while the process of carrying forward the goods
on the shoulders of the men was exceedingly laborious. The poor dogs,
too, were constantly falling between masses, and dragging each other
down, so that they gave more trouble at last than they were worth.

In all these trying circumstances, the Eskimo women were almost as
useful as the men. Indeed they would have been quite as useful if they
had been as strong, and they bore the fatigues and trials of the journey
with the placid good humour, and apparent, if not real, humility of
their race.

At last, one afternoon, our discoverers came suddenly to the edge of
this great barrier of ancient ice, and beheld, from an elevated plateau
to which they had climbed, a scene which was calculated to rouse in
their breasts feelings at once of admiration and despair, for there,
stretching away below them for several miles, lay a sea of comparatively
level ice, and beyond it a chain of stupendous glaciers, which presented
an apparently impassable barrier--a huge continuous wall of ice that
seemed to rise into the very sky.

This chain bore all the evidences of being very old ice--compared to
which that of the so-c