Mons. Gainvard's expedition quitted Hammerfest, the northernmost town in Scandinavia, and after a voyage of some weeks in duration, approached the gloomy coast of ice-bound Spitzbergen. The ice-fields and the icebergs inspired Madame d'Aunet with profound emotion, and, in describing them, she breaks out into what may be called a lyrical cry. "These Polar ices," she exclaims, "which no dust has ever stained, as spotless now as on the first day of the creation, are tinted with the vividest colours, so that they look like rocks composed of precious stones: the glitter of the diamond, the dazzling hues of the sapphire and the emerald, blend in an unknown and marvellous substance. Yonder floating islands, incessantly undermined by the sea, change their outline every moment; by an abrupt movement the base becomes the summit; a spire transforms itself into a mushroom; a column broadens out into a vast flat table, a tower is changed into a flight of steps; and all so rapidly and unexpectedly that, in spite of oneself, one dreams that some supernatural will presides over those sudden transformations. At the first glance I could not help thinking that I saw before me a city of the fays, destroyed at one fell blow by a superior power, and condemned to disappear without leaving a trace of its existence. Around me hustled fragments of the architecture of all periods and every style: campaniles, columns, minarets, ogives, pyramids, turrets, cupolas, crenelations, volutes, arcades, facades, colossal foundations, sculptures as delicate as those which festoon the shapely pillars of our cathedrals--all were massed together and confused in a common disaster. An _ensemble_ so strange, so marvellous, the artist's brush is unable to reproduce, and the writer's words fail adequately to describe! "This region, where everything is cold and inert, has been represented, has it not? as enveloped in a deep and sublime silence. But the reader must please to receive a very different impression; nothing can give any fit idea of the tremendous tumult of a day of thaw at Spitzbergen. "The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice, clangs and clatters noisily; the lofty littoral peaks glide down to the shore, fall away, and plunge into the gulf of waters with an awful crash. The mountains are rent and splintered; the waves dash furiously against the granite capes; the icebergs, as they shiver into pieces, give vent to sharp reports like the rattle of musketry; the wind with a hoarse roar, scatters tornadoes of snow abroad.... It is terrible, it is magnificent; one seems to hear the chorus of the abysses of the old world preluding a new chaos. "Never before has one seen or heard anything comparable to that which one sees and hears there; one has conceived of nothing like it, even in one's dreams! It belongs at once to the fantastic and to the real: it disconcerts the memory, dazes the mind, and fills it with an indescribable sense of awe and admiration.