The Press.
London, England, 1857-08-15 00:00:00

There at last was the long sought for mountain actually
tumbling down upon our heads. Columbus could not
have been more pleased when—after nights of watching
—he saw the first fires of a new hemisphere dance upon
the water; nor, indeed, scarcely less disappointed at their
sudden disappearance than I was, when—after having
gone below to wake Sigurdr, and tell him we had seen
bona fide terra firma—l found, on returning upon deck,
that the roof of mist had closed again, and shut out all
trace of the transient vision. However, I had got a clutch
of the island, and no alight matter should make me let go
my hold. In the meantime there was nothing for it but
to wait patiently until the curtain lifted ; and no child ever
stared more eagerly at a green drop•scene in expectation of
" the realm of dazzling splendour" promised in the bill,
than I did at the motionless grey folds that hung around
us. At last the hour of liberation came: a purer light
seemed gradually to penetrate the atmosphere, brown
turned to grey, and grey to white, and white to transparent
blue, until the lost horizon entirely reappeared, except
where in one direction an impenetrable veil of haze still
hung suspended from the zenith to the sea. Behind that
veil I knew must lie Jan Mayen.

A few minutes more, and slowly, silently, in a manner
you could take no count of, its dusky hem first deepened
to a violet tinge, then gradually lifting, displayed a long
line of coast—in reality but the roots of Beerenberg—dyed
of the darkest purple; while, obedient to a common im•
pulse, the clouds that wrapt its summit gently disengaged
themselves, and left the mountain standing in all the
magnificence of his (1,870 feet, girdled by a single zone of
pearly vapour, from underneath whose floating folds seven
enormous glaciers rolled down into the sea! Nature
seemed to have turned scene•shifter, so artfully were the
phases of this glorious spectacle successively developed.
Although—by reason of our having hit upon its aide
instead of its narrow end—the outline of Mount Beeren-
berg appeared to us more like a sugar loaf than a spire—
broader at the base and rounder at the top than I had
imagined—in size, colour, and effect, it far surpassed any-
thing I had anticipated. The glaciers were quite an un-
expected element of beauty. Imagine a mighty river of as
great a volume as the Thames—started down the side of
a mountain—bursting over every impediment—whirled
into a thousand eddies—tumbling and raging on from
ledge to ledge in quivering cataracts of foam—then
suddenly struck rigid by a power so instantaneous in its
action, that even the froth and fleeting wreaths of spray
have stiffened to the immutability of sculpture. Unless
you had seen it, it would be almost impossible to conceive
the strangeness of the contrast between the actual tran-
quillity of these silent crystal rivers and the violent de-
scending energy impressed upon their exterior. You must
remember, too, all this is upon a scale of such prodigious
magnitude, that when we succeeded subsequently in ap-
proaching the spot—where with a leap like that of Niagara
one of these glaciers plunges down into the sea—the eye,
no longer able to take in its fluvial character, was content
to rest in simple astonishment at what then appeared a
lucent precipice of grey-green ice, rising to the height of
several hundred feet above the masts of the vessel.

After a run down to Hammerfest, in Nor-
way, the most northerly town in Europe, the
Foam started on the 28th of July for Spitz-
bergen, and, by coasting along the ice, and
taking advantage of the gulf-stream, succeeded
in reaching English Bay in that island—
" within 630 miles of the Pole, and within 100
" miles as far north as any ship has ever
" succeeded in getting."

Strange indeed is the landscape of this icy
solitude, lying within the Arctic Circle, and
in a " higher latitude" than any part of
Europe or even of America which has yet
been reached :

And now, hew shall I give you an idea of the wonderful
panorama in the midst of which we found ourselves? I
think, perhaps, its most striking feature was the stillness
—and deadness—and impassibility of this new world: ice,
and rock, and water surrounded us; not a sound of any
kind interrupted the silence; the sea did not break upon
the shore ; no bird or any living thing was ♦isible ; the
midnight sun—by this time muffled in a transparent
mist—shed an awful, mystericus lustre on glacier and
mountain ; no atom of vegetation gave token of the
earth's vitality; a universal numbness and dumbness
seemed to pervade the solitude. I suppose in scarcely
any other part of the world is this appearance of deadness
so strikingly exhibited. On the stillest summer day in
England there is always perceptible an undertone of life
thrilling through the atmosphere; and though no breeze
should stir a single leaf, yet—in default of motion—there
is always a sense of growth; but here not so much as a
blade of grass was to be seen, ou the sides of the bald ex-
coriated hills. Primeval rocks—and eternal ice—consti-
tute the landscape.

Down towards either horn run two ranges of schistose
rocks about 1,500 feet high, their sides almost !wecipitous,
and the topmost ridge as sharp as a knife, and jagged as a
saw; the intervening space is entirely filled up by an
enormous glacier, which—descending with one continuous
inclino from the head of a valley on the right, and sweep-
ing, like a torrent round the roots of an isolated clump of
hills in the centre—rolls at last into the sea. The length
of the glacial river from the spot where it apparently first
originated, could not have been less than thirty or thirty-
five miles ; or its greatest breadth—less than nine or ten ;
hut so completely did it fill up the higher end of the valley,
that it was as much as you could do to distinguish the
further mountains peeping up above its surface. The
height of the precipice where it fell into the sea I should
judge to have been about 1.20 feet.