"A level snow-covered surface was rising up in inclined planes or rudely undulating curves. These, breaking at their summits, fell off on each side in masses of twenty tons' weight. Tables of six feet in thickness by twenty of perpendicular height, and some of them fifteen yards in length, surging up into the misty air, heaving, rolling, tottering, and falling with a majestic deliberation worthy of the forces that impelled them." The following descriptions indicate the narrow escapes of the ships from destruction during disruptions of the ice-pack: "The separated sides would come together with an explosion like a mortar, craunching the newly formed field and driving it headlong in fragments for fifty feet upon the floe till it piled up against our bulwarks. Everything betokened a crisis. Sledges, boats, packages of all sorts were disposed in order; contingencies were met as they approached by new delegations of duty; every man was at work, officers and seamen alike. The Rescue, crippled and thrown away from us to the further side of a chasm, was deserted, and her company consolidated with ours. Our own brig groaned and quivered under the pressure against her sides." "The ice came in with the momentum before mentioned as irresistible, progressive, and grand. All expected to betake ourselves sledgeless to the ice, for the open space around the vessel barely admits of a foot-board. The timbers and even cross-beams protected by shores vibrated so as to communicate to you the peculiar tremor of a cotton-factory. Presently the stern of the brig, by a succession of jerking leaps, began to rise, while her bows dipped toward the last night's ice ahead. Everybody looked to see her fall upon her beam-ends and rushed out upon the ice." "On the 13th the hummock ridge astern advanced with a steady march upon the vessel. Twice it rested and advanced again--a dense wall of ice, thirty feet broad at the base and twelve feet high, tumbling huge fragments from its crest, yet increasing in mass at every new effort. We had ceased to hope, when a merciful interposition arrested it, so close against our counter that there was scarcely room for a man to pass between. Half a minute of progress more and it would have buried us all. As we drifted along five months afterward this stupendous memento of controlling power was still hanging over our stern." The discomfort of the prescribed out-of-door exercise in extreme cold appears from the following: [Illustration: A Sleeping-bag for Three Men.]